The road to the White House gets tougher the longer you stay on it - and more expensive.
Magazine publisher Steve Forbes is the latest Republican contender to drop out, having spent over $30 million (£24 million) of his inherited personal fortune. If you add in his unsuccessful campaign in the 1996 election, he will have spent about $70 million in trying to become President of the United States.
It goes to show that even in America money can't buy everything. "Never has so much been spent with so little in return," commented Larry Markinson, of the Centre for Responsive Politics, a research group that studies money and campaigns.
"This will go down in the annals of presidential politics as a spectacular example of the dictum that just throwing money at an election doesn't win you office. It's a lesson that seems to be an expensive one for millionaires," Mr Markinson said.
For Mr Forbes, whose personal wealth is said to be over $1 billion, there were "no regrets". He said: "This was a fantastic, phenomenal experience, seeing America, learning about America in a way few people get to do it."
He can say that again. But why did he do it?
The dogs in the street knew he could never win, even with his proposal to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and the 17,000 page tax code which terrifies Americans at this time every year as they struggle with their tax forms. In their place, Forbes would put a flat 17 per cent income tax, with exemptions for spouses and children. There would be no need to pay accountants to help with the forms but the rich would get a lot richer.
Forbes's conservatism, accompanied by a rigid anti-abortion stance, made him too right wing even for a Republican party which hankers for the glories of the Reagan era. But Forbes has another problem. He just didn't look right and that is a fatal flaw in TV-obsessed American politics.
The geeky-looking Forbes acknowledged this ruefully himself when he was beaten into third place this week in Delaware, a state he won in 1996. "Some of us do well on the television screen and some don't, which is why I'm in the print business," he said.
The departure of Forbes will give some relief to the hard-pressed Governor George Bush, who will be hoping to pick up the religious right Forbes supporters in South Carolina in next week's primary.
Bush, as the front-runner for the Republican nomination over the past year, has had to project himself as a winner in an overcrowded field which until fairly recently had nine runners.
One by one, John Kasich, Lamar Alexander, Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle, Orrin Hatch and now Steve Forbes have dropped out. Now there is just Bush, Senator John McCain and the TV chat show host and former State Department official, Alan Keyes. But it is in reality a two-horse race between Bush and McCain, like the Democratic nomination contest between Vice-President Al Gore and former New Jersey senator, Bill Bradley.
Bush will be relieved to see the end of Forbes. There was an open hostility between the two as Forbes continually criticised Bush on his record in Texas on taxes. In 1996, Forbes damaged Republican front-runner Bob Dole with negative TV ads before he dropped out of that race. The Bush campaign was braced for a repeat performance from Forbes in South Carolina.
Bush had refused to accept federal funding during his primary elections campaign, because this means also accepting limits on what you can spend. With Forbes backed by a huge personal fortune, Bush felt he could not risk being outspent in TV advertising if Forbes decided to stay in the race for the full primary campaign.
Now Bush is awash with money - he has raised about $70 million and spent about $50 million - but he is fighting for his political life against Vietnam war veteran McCain, who raised only a fraction of that amount and yet has a bandwagon rolling that money could not buy.
If Bush can win South Carolina, McCain will need much more money to keep his campaign alive in the key states of New York, California and Ohio on March 7th or Super Tuesday, where blanket TV advertising will have to replace the McCain "Straight Talk Express" to reach the voters.
Forbes has not decided if he will endorse either candidate. For him, neither is a true conservative. A Wall Street Journal columnist has called Forbes "the last of the true believers. He offered himself to the Republican primary electorate as the living embodiment of the conservative cause, in the hope that conservatives nationwide would be drawn to him because of the strength of his ideas."
But the electorate this year seems to be looking at the personalities of the candidates rather than their ideas. Maybe it is a fallout from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Character counts, as they say.
Yet there were Steve Forbes and the other clean-living conservatives such as Gary Bauer campaigning with their wives and daughters to no avail, while McCain, who has confessed that he treated his first wife badly, and George Bush, who has confessed to a hard-drinking past, get all the attention.
Virtue is not an election winner. But neither is unlimited money. Reformed sinners are more exciting.