Let's start with the praise: From a position of severe disadvantage, Yair Lapid is now fighting like a true campaigner. I wish Moshe Kahlon looked like this. While Kahlon wanders half-paralyzed from conference to conference, Lapid shoots in all directions.
Some more praise: To Lapid's credit, he did not shy away from trying to take responsibility in this term. He took the Finance Ministry (not that he had much of a choice) and placed himself at the head of the housing cabinet, while the Housing Minister ran away from it like a fire.
After that, it's impossible not to shout out indignation at his recent speeches.
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The man who didn't say a word in real time about the pistachio ice cream, the water bill, the candle bill, the head of the house and the prime minister's wife, the milk carton, and Yvette Lieberman's old cases, suddenly remembered that there is corruption in the country (in his defense, it should be said that he did oppose buying the plane for the prime minister).
It's deeper than that: Lapid is now frustrated by the almost insultingly low scores he sees in his in-depth polls.
The other day, Lapid presented the Haganah case, a fictitious newspaper headline about what could have been written now, if only they had let him continue working.
So here is the lawsuit's case, the headline of the newspaper that he could and should have issued at the end of March 2013: "Finance Minister Lapid presented the new budget, headed by a series of revolutionary reforms: The Settlement Division will become a department in the Ministry of Housing, the JNF will be abolished, the distribution of coalition funds will be banned, and the gas monopoly will be dismantled.".
Lapid did none of these things.
When he took office, he declared that there would be no coalition funds, but then allowed it to happen, succumbing to pressure.
Lapid did not confront the gas monopoly, he approved the insane transfer of budgets to the Settlement Division, which has poured hundreds of millions of shekels into it in recent years, and enabled a massive transfer of funds to the settlements.
It was with an existing fund that he began to confront. Unfortunately, it was already too late.
It is not appropriate for Lapid to forget the basic rule – there is no second chance to make a first impression.
The first alliance the Finance Minister made was with Ofer Eini, the last one who should have been connected to the budget. Instead of taking advantage of the fact that he came from a party devoid of activists and internal politics and starting real revolutions, even against strong committees, he chose the easy path of collecting money from the public.
If he had started a Don Quixote war against the centers of power, it would not only have been more fundamentally correct, it would also have been politically wiser. He was in the perfect position to do it. Even if he had lost one battle or another, it would still have been credited to his credit, but Lapid did not try, or tried at a late stage (the tender in the ports).
A large part of the problem stemmed from the fact that Lapid likes to be surrounded by baseball players, some of his people behave more like a groupie of the talent on TV, and the talent has developed a serious addiction to the polls of his American pollster.
The total lack of knowledge that Lapid brought with him to the Treasury forced him to take in his immediate environment and Treasury officials, people who know the corridors and procedures, every official and every regulation.
Instead, Lapid, with self-confidence and arrogance, crushed the authority of the top finance officials, announced that he was not willing to participate in a discussion in which the person responsible for housing in the budget division was participating, and publicly reprimanded the person responsible for higher education in the budget division for not doing anything wrong.
It is certainly the prerogative of a Minister of Finance to impose his authority on his officials, provided that this authority is built on knowledge and experience.
Even in the political sphere, Lapid's statements are now tainted with dishonesty.
Lapid was one of the least influential ministers on Protective Edge (only Aharonovitch had less influence). He presented no real political outline, neither before nor after.
His talk about participating in the donor conference and "rehabilitation in exchange for denuclearization" is hollow and empty talk. There is no real strategy behind this title for how to do it.
In the negotiations with the Palestinians, he was not even present, barely knowing what was happening, let alone making a real attempt to influence.
Lapid's campaign so far has been broadcasting the slogan "They stopped us in the middle," Lapid's real story is "We didn't know how to start.".
• The article was published this morning in Haaretz: http://drucker10.net
