WASHINGTON – On the eve of Iran’s presidential election, President Bush promised that a “tide of freedom” sweeping the region would eventually come to the country.

The president’s remarks capped off a subtle campaign from his administration to depict Friday’s vote as a sham. Last month, Secretary of State Rice harshly criticized a decision by Iran’s guardian council to exclude all reformist and female candidates for the presidency. On Wednesday, the deputy assistant secretary of state and the vice president’s daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, was interviewed on the Voice of America’s Persian service and said America would not pursue diplomatic relations with Iran until the country changed significantly.

In the days leading up to Friday’s election, Iran’s hard-line clerics and even some presidential candidates urged their countrymen to vote in or der to anger America. On Sunday, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry warned the White House against “fortune-telling.”

Mr. Bush clearly did not follow that advice. “Today, Iran is ruled by men who suppress liberty at home and spread terror across the world,” he said in a written statement for the press. “Power is in the hands of an unelected few who have retained power through an electoral process that ignores the basic requirements of democracy.”

In words that came close to declaring today’s election a fraud, Mr. Bush said, “The June 17th presidential elections are sadly consistent with this oppressive record.”

Iran’s mullahs have attempted to refute this perception by inviting sympathetic Americans to Tehran to observe the vote. Actor Sean Penn tops the list – the actor interviewed a former president and current presidential candidate, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani for the San Francisco Chronicle.

But Mr. Penn is not the only American that the regime hopes will convey Friday’s vote as free and fair. In an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations published yesterday, a professor from Brown University, William Beeman, said that after a visit to the country he concluded that Iran’s elections were “real.”

Mr. Beeman said in the interview, “If the administration can’t say anything nice, then they really should say nothing. Whether one likes the fact that candidates were vetted before the election or not, there’s no question that this is a real election and it really is happening. And this is not an election that is controlled and it’s not an election where we know the outcome.”

Earlier this month, a leading dissident journalist, Akbar Ganji, gave an interview to an opposition Web site in which he urged a boycott of the election and challenged the unelected supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to stand for office. Mr. Ganji was re-arrested over the weekend sparking demonstrations in front of Evin prison, where he is incarcerated.

The last line of Mr. Bush’s statement on the Iranian election seemed tailored to Mr. Ganji and other political prisoners. “To the Iranian people, I say: ‘As you stand for your own liberty, the people of America stand with you.’ “

But Mr. Bush’s policy on Iranian democracy of late has been largely rhetoric. The State Department has yet to spend a modest $3 million set aside by Congress for 2005 to fund democratic civil-society groups in Iran. On the question of Iran’s nuclear program, the official position from the White House supports European-led talks with Tehran to persuade the mullahs to allow full inspections of its facilities and abandon uranium enrichment. Yesterday, the International Atomic Energy Agency released another interim report scolding the Iranians for not being forthcoming. European delegations met earlier this month with some presidential candidates, including a former higher education minister, Mostafa Moin. Mr. Moin is considered an heir apparent to President Khatemi’s legacy of reform. Yet both men have been publicly mocked by student organizations for allowing the supreme leader to effectively veto any expansion of personal freedoms in the last eight years. Mr. Moin last month was urged not to stand for election by an umbrella student organization, the Office to Consolidate Unity.

On the Senate floor yesterday, Senator Brownback, a Republican of Kansas, derided Friday’s presidential elections and reiterated his support for the democracy movement in Iran.

“These elections hold no hope of change for the people. They are elections that will be boycotted in protest, and they are elections that have been manipulated by the Supreme Leader and Council of Guardians,” Mr. Brownback said.

“The people of Iran want change. That change will not come through elections, but it will come through strong international support for the very people that protest and boycott the elections.”