The cost of fielding a candidate has become so astronomical that the concept of a people’s candidate is just an abstraction.
I think it is wrong to spend $4 or $5 million in a campaign.
A million dollars in the presidential election is a spit in the ocean. It's not a lot of money.
Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with.
I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor.
One doesn't need money to run for Parliament, but it is undoubtedly expensive.
These endless legal challenges that define elections in New York are a joke in this country, and they are the reason why it is so expensive, or one of the reasons, it's so expensive to run here and why so many people decide not to run.
You need a lot of money to become president.
When I came into power, I found that the party managers had taken it all to themselves. I could not name my own Cabinet. They had sold out every place to pay the election expenses.
The need for collecting large campaign funds would vanish if Congress provided an appropriation for the proper and legitimate expenses of each of the great national parties, an appropriation ample enough to meet the necessity for thorough organization and machinery, which requires a large expenditure of money. Then the stipulation should be made that no party receiving campaign funds from the Treasury should accept more than a fixed amount from any individual subscriber or donor; and the necessary publicity for receipts and expenditures could without difficulty be provided.
The cost of congressional and presidential campaigns has been leaping every two or four years. I think this year it will be 60 percent more than 1996; well over twice as much as in 1992 in the presidential and congressional races.
