Please understand that I am not trying to "score points" here with a joke, but my honest reaction when I encounter this is "(S)He's never going to make it past the nomination process."

Which so far has a 100% success rate.

Politicians do that because otherwise they don't get elected. One of the core competencies of a modern politician is to have their feet held to the fire, and dance away from it unscathed. I'm not kidding; if you can't do that, you will not reach the national stage... or at least you won't stay for long. The reason is that whatever substantial answer you give to a question like that pisses off more people than you excite. On the other hand, a vague answer excites those whom you want to excite as they will read into it what they want to see, but doesn't piss anybody off because it's really just a generality.

If you really want to accomplish something, step one is understanding the landscape. You can do things, but trying to get straight answers out of politicians is not step one of any plan that will work.