Rahm Emanuel Quotes

Not only the candidate should not be required, he should not be permitted, to incur any but a limited and trifling expense for his election.

Spending for congressional campaigns is getting to be like the arms race.

I don't think anyone's pushing for spending limits in the campaign.

There is no evidence that super PACs have led to a greater percentage of negative ads.

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.

We have to talk about the way we finance campaigns.

I think it is wrong to spend $4 or $5 million in a campaign.

When you buy toothpaste or detergent or gas, that is now used for the first time in your lifetime or my lifetime to support candidates in so-called 'independent ads.' Same thing for unions.

We are told there is not enough money for education, but somehow there is enough money for people to raise billions of dollars to defeat somebody in an election? Oh! Okay! Does that make sense?

Unless our democratic philosophy is wrong, there can be no evil in a candidate spending a legally permissible and necessary sum to approach the electorate and enable them to pass an informed judgment upon his qualifications.

If the friends of the candidate choose to go to expense for committees and canvassing [campaigning] there are no means of preventing them; but such expenses out of the candidate’s own pocket, or any expenses whatever beyond the deposit of £50 (or £100), should be illegal and punishable.

History’s pendulum is now swinging back toward the day when political finances were only lightly regulated.

Even though Mr. Trump can give his campaign as much of his own money as he wants to, he can't ask other people to front the money for him and promise to pay them back later without reporting the arrangement in a timely fashion to the Federal Election Commission.

In the 2016 U.S. Senate race, I was on the receiving end of more than $3 million in outside negative attacks funded by the NRA, the second-most spent on any Senate campaign in the country.

Campaigns are so much more expensive than people think they are. Just to keep the lights on is several thousand dollars a month.

There probably could be some mileage in running a comparative study about how best to finance electoral campaigns around the world.

The dominant advertising advantage of Clinton, with spending of 10 to 1 over Trump, reinforced the perception that she was trying to buy, rather than earn, votes.

The Koch brothers are spending more money against me than I've been able to raise.

The first thing I learned is that campaigns are about money. I had this romantic idea that campaigns were about law and debates and so forth, which is just not true. It's about money.

[Donald Trump] doesn't have the money to run commercials and I launched into a tirade on money in politics.

It's a matter of fact that Senator Obama has spent more money on negative ads than any political campaign in history.

The [Democratic] party is a bank. It collects money and gives it to TV stations.

If the publicly passed campaign finance laws had not been struck down by the Supreme Court, Club for Growth Action would be illegal, and Heritage Action wouldn't have the SuperPAC threat to back up its small ad purchases.

In 'Citizens United v. FEC', the Supreme Court ruled that sections of the federal campaign finance law known as McCain-Feingold imposed unconstitutional restrictions on the First Amendment rights of corporations.

Citizens United didn't work. Hey, Koch brothers, Karl Rove, Shellgame Adelson: Democracy trumps money sometimes.