As I suffer through the increasing obfuscation of the Bush administration, I’m looking for a candidate who can give a clear answer to a clear question. I’ve had enough ridiculous parsing of every word that emanates from the White House and the tortuous Orwellian logic used to try to convince me that ignoring the Constitution keeps me safe and that secrecy leads to liberty.

Because of this, I compiled the performance scores of each candidate in the past three Democratic debates to see if I could identify any trends. Every candidate is going to have a poor public showing at one time or another. But doing the same thing repeatedly is a trend, if not a strategy. One of the best ways to judge someone’s intentions is not to fixate on what he does in a singular moment, but rather to pay attention to what he does over a stretch of time. Once is a mistake. Twice may be coincidence. Three times is deliberate strategy.

If you want to see their performances on an individual night, here’s the second debate, third debate, and the YouTube debate.

With that in mind I created the table below to analyze the Democratic candidates debate performance across the last three events. A couple surprising revelations resulted.

One surprise was despite never having won a Straight Talk award in any of the debates, Bill Richardson has been the least evasive overall. With Richardson, you have nearly a three-quarters chance of getting your question answered. Even more surprising is that five of the eight candidates just are about as straight forward as Richardson.

Chances of getting a debate question answered:

1. Bill Richardson (73%)
2. John Edwards & Mike Gravel (72%)
3. Joe Biden (71%)
4. Chris Dodd (70%)
5. Barack Obama (64%)
6. Dennis Kucinich (59%)
7. Hillary Clinton (48%)

Hillary Clinton was clearly the most evasive. This is not to surprising considering she was the most evasive in every debate I’ve tracked thus far. The especially sad part is you have better odds of getting heads on a coin toss that of getting a straight answer out of Hillary. If it weren’t for name recognition, she wouldn’t have a chance at being taken seriously because she usually doesn’t says anything substantial enough to even qualify as an answer.

When it comes to dodging a question, Barack Obama clearly favors hollow, empty answers. In fact he favors that approach just as often as Hillary does. So what is the main distinction between them? Only once did Obama ignore a question entirely, whereas Hillary ignored nine of them. So while you may not get a straight answer out of Obama, he’s not going to ignore you either. Edwards and Gravel appear to have the same strategy.

I’ll provide the same analysis of the Republicans as soon as I have data from at least three debates.