Their electoral performance has been wilting ever since Millhead, for the want of a conspicuous success.
Instead of wilting, the visitors seemed to grow in belief, the brilliant Sturrock, Gallacher and Ferguson all going close as the home fans grew more and more restless.
I couldn't help but marvel at the layers of slowly wilting vegetables, leaves and grass composed as thoughtfully as a cook might go about a recipe.
Instead of calling foreign investors "locusts", as Mr Müntefering did last year, the programme says that private-equity funds are part of a healthy financial sector.Yet enthusiasm for reform seems to be wilting.
Rather than wilting under the Western attention caused by the attack, with Michelle Obama leading the call to "bring back our girls", the group has been boosted by the impotent reaction of regional governments.
Venturing into a restaurant, they would quietly and even gratefully accept some tepid muck masquerading as Brown Windsor soup, with a smear of margarine on bread, followed by Spam and bottled salad cream on two wilting leaves of lettuce, topped off by jelly and custard.
It would have been much better, he argues, to invest in proven technologies such as electrical interconnectors (linking Britain and Norway, for example) and support research into new kinds of solar power, such as films that can be applied to any outside surface and technologies that use a wider chunk of the spectrum.Bits of the green-energy world are wilting under the impact of low oil prices.
But demand for home loans was wilting even before the credit crisis, because of tighter monetary policy.
Their flower garlands were wilting in the heat.
Yet just as the French economy is wilting under competitive pressure, so too is Paris.
Moreover, Mr Lugar's defeat, says Theda Skocpol, of Harvard, "will send another shudder through the Republican ranks in Congress".Those who thought the tea-party movement was wilting after helping to propel Republicans to a thumping victory in the mid-term elections of 2010, Mr Mourdock argues, were simply mistaking evolution for disillusion.
