The best that its friends can say of the Government is that for the last three years it hasn't been running the country.
This isn't a disclaimer - it's a boast. Those who've gained most from the Coalition's policies favour the American way: small government, less government, no government worth the name.
Their slogans are simple: whatever you say, do nothing. If the State owns it, sell it.
Life, loot and the pursuit of profit are best left to the market. If you feel like singing, do sing a song that makes sense in the real world: deregulation once again.
And privatise, privatise, privatise.
The trouble with this is that it's not the stuff the lads expect when they head for the ardfheis.
So what does Fianna Fail stand for now? It's hard to say. At any rate, when Vincent Browne questioned some backbenchers the other night, the nearest he got to an answer was surprisingly oldfashioned: FF stands for the Republic, they said.
The last Fianna Failer who was heard to say he stood by the republic didn't fare too well: he was condemned bell, book and candle for conduct unbecoming of a member of the party and fired.
Des O'Malley (for it was he) was marginalised. Then he set up the Progressive Democrats and undermined from outside what he'd failed to reform from within.
First the PDs entered coalition with Fianna Fail, a relationship that was strictly taboo under the old singleparty government code.
Now the PDs, with the help of Charlie McCreevy, have charted a transatlantic course and the Coalition is bound for the shores on which that industrial dream, the Massachusetts Miracle, foundered.
Fianna Fail, of course, is not the only party to lay claim to the title "republican".
So does Sinn Fein, which some had thought a possible partner for FF after the next general election.
Not so, said Ahern, who was gently questioned by Charlie Bird on RTE radio and television on Wednesday. Partnership is out - not only until the IRA had decommissioned its weapons, but until the paramilitary force has been disbanded.
Which means that Ahern is even more determined than David Trimble to follow the "no guns, no government" line. It also means that the backbenchers who shrugged off the Taoiseach's statement when Vincent Browne asked them about it may have to change their tune.
It's a long time since Fianna Fail has abandoned the simple tenets of the Coru (the party rulebook). Current members probably can't remember much more than its emphasis on the national question and the Irish language.
It has taken prosperity to expose the deeper weaknesses in the party's make-up. But, in days when the party - and the people - dreamed of being able to afford a decent standard of living for all who were born here, all but one of this week's controversies and news reports would have been unimaginable.
There was the claim by the stockbrokers ABN-AMRO that house prices in Ireland are affordable. Houses were cheap now, according to its analyst, Dan McLaughlin, because in three, four or five years they'd be dearer.
Eamon Gilmore of Labour called this Myles na Gopaleen stuff on Prime Time. And John FitzGerald of the ESRI agreed.
Peter Bacon - the author of the Bacon report on housing - later told an Oireachtas committee that the average industrial wage was "insufficient to engage in home ownership in a way that was not the case 20 years ago". But he had some good news.
House prices may be increasing, but the rate of increase is not. This is something called the decelerating rate of acceleration.
A medical specialist depending on the Exchequer appealed for funds and equipment to help combat a problem which affects 40 per cent of all women over 50 - osteoporosis. And she supported her perfectly reasonable appeal with an argument about budgetary savings later on.
It now seems that every case made to this Government begins and ends with cost, savings and the Department of Finance, irrespective of social need.
But no arguments are heard when Ministers cast about for something, anything to sell - from semi-State companies to bits of the Army.
The mad rush to the new right extends to hospitals. We read of penalties being imposed for keeping patients too long in their beds. Waiting lists grow. So does the trend towards the American way.
Healthcare, too, is moving towards a regime under which the gap between private funding and public service will have widened to unbridgeable proportions.
But while the Government is prepared to take on nurses and the bus drivers, others - the people for whom the economy is designed and run - are encouraged at every hand's turn to borrow and spend.
No one seems to remember what happened in the 1970s when land became so valuable and competition so fierce that some bank managers put up money for opposing bidders in the same deal.
One of the few notes struck for old stagers this weekend must be Sile de Valera's proposal to initiate the privatisation of RTE. Her attack on the station shows that some things haven't changed.
Here's a Minister with a project to delight such old enemies of public service broadcasting as Ray Burke and Micheal O Morain.