Waffles are delicious. That grid pattern? Sheer genius. Right up there with electricity and the printing press among the all time great inventions. If you distribute your syrup carefully, dribbling just a bit in every square, you can get precisely the right ratio of sweetness to doughyness in every single bite. Pancakes, with their consistent, unwavering smoothness, are fundamentally flawed: always either too much syrup per bite or too little. Pancakes know no moderation, no subtlety. A pancake is a unified, clearly defined thing and many consider its cohesiveness a virtue, but it is structurally predisposed against balance, against equilibrium.

If I could ask the two presidential candidates one question, I’d want to ask which they prefer, pancakes or waffles. Why? Because the one thing our politics needs more than anything else, more than campaign finance reform and de-sound-bite-ification combined, is a renewed appreciation for waffles, waffling, and wafflers. Now, I know a lot of people associate flipping and flopping with pancakes, but both are really properties of the waffle. And I’m pro flip-flop. JFK was a flip-flopper and a waffle man; that guy could not leggo his Eggo. His foreign policy was all over the map, not a hint of Goldwaterish “moral clarity.” And he did OK. How about Reagan? He flipped and flopped on a macro scale, yielding his campaign belligerence toward the USSR as he realized that he had a real negotiating partner in Gorbachev. Wafflers make great presidents. Unwavering consistency does not.

One of the great frustrations of this election for me is the anti-waffle media prejudice. The lessons producers and journalists seem to have learned from the 2004 election seem to be that the two great sins a democratic candidate can commit are a) windsurfing, or equivalent and b) waffling. Obama is constantly being lambasted for supposedly flipping and flopping on this or that issue. If you ask me, this is a symptom of newsrooms being hollowed out and replaced with a few interns who know how to do a Lexis Nexis search. It doesn’t take much to find a minor inconsistency when candidates are stumping three times a day for 18 months and the interwebs are cataloguing all of it. Cable news is a hungry beast. It needs to be fed.

Waffling, to me, means intellectual honesty. It means a willingness to understand opinions you don’t agree with. It means listening to people other than communications and media consultants. If Obama’s a flip-flopper, I say we’ll all benefit from a healthier politics and a tastier syrup distribution.