I'm not overly put-out by the amount of money "wasted" on campaigns and elections. I understand that there are many different ideas on the nature and function of government and I believe debates on such subjects (and campaigns and elections, which are effectively the same thing) to be extremely important. Personally I think we should do much better and have higher quality campaigns and higher quality candidates, but I think it is fully justified that such enormously important processes require significant amounts of resources. Though also I could imagine, and might prefer, a scenario where the process was not nearly so expensive.