Speaking to John Dickerson at the Aspen Ideas Festival (via a transcript):

DICKERSON: You were known as a pretty good fund-raiser. Did you though enjoy it?  Is it something that if you could fix the system you would say, you know, we could really do without that because that’s 70 percent of the time, boy, I could be spending it meeting with those people or talking about policy?

ROMNEY: Look, it’s fun to be with fund-raisers because the people are gracious, they are supporting you, they are writing checks to you and it’s a wonderful thing, but it’s a bad part of politics.  And I’d far rather — as a person running for office, I’d far rather be out with voters and —

(Applause)

ROMNEY: — and trying to convince people why they should vote for me.  We’ve got a real mess.  I mean, I hope you realize it, but the combination of what the Constitution demands and also what Congress put in place with campaign finance reform is that campaigns are less and less responsible for the message of the candidate and these super PACs which are not run by the campaign or by the candidate are taking a larger and larger role.  And so there’s really no limit on campaign investing if you will, contribution.  There’s no limit basically at all anymore.  But the changes that instead of the money going to the candidate who’s then responsible for what’s said and done with the money, it goes to outside groups.

And so in some respects and I think in a lot of respects, it’s worse than if there were no campaign finance limits at all, and all the money went to candidates, but right now we’ve got a very unfortunate financial setting in campaigns, and I don’t want to be too partisan, I’m kind of impartisan obviously, but we didn’t have as much of a problem when the people running for office were following the federal guidelines, taking federal money and that limited what they could do, but when President Obama ran the first time, he’s the first post-Nixon presidential candidate to say I’m not going to abide by federal limits.  And John McCain didn’t agree to the same thing and therefore got borne away and now I think it’s changed for ever.  And with the current system we’ve got a real mess and it’s got to change.