“He has cornered himself as the ‘elitist mullah’ who cares about buying Airbus and Boeing planes but not [about providing] subsidies and handouts for the poor,” said Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “Rouhani needs to play that populist game. To get people out, he can’t just talk about foreign policy — detente with the United States, reconsidering our position with Israel. That’s all great for city folks, but out in the countryside, they want to know, ‘How am I going to feed my family?'”