Is This Bias?

The following paragraph from Dan Balz’s and Vanessa Williams’s article (“Poll Shows Bush With Solid Lead”) on the front page of today’s Washington Post bothers me.

Bush’s relentless attacks on Kerry have badly damaged the Democratic nominee, the survey and interviews showed. Voters routinely describe Kerry as wishy-washy, as a flip-flopper and as a candidate they are not sure they can trust, almost as if they are reading from Bush campaign ad scripts. But Kerry’s problems are also partly of his own making. Despite repeated efforts to flesh out his proposals on Iraq, terrorism and other issues, he has yet to break through to undecided voters as someone who has clear plans for fixing the country’s biggest problems.

I’m not sure whether what bothers me is subtle bias or simply sloppy writing, but here’s what I don’t like.

First, the chicken-and-egg question: Has Kerry been damaged more by “Bush’s relentless attacks” or by the nature of his own character and campaign, which has made him vulnerable to those attacks? Looking at another example, take Gary Hart (no, you take Gary Hart): no one, I think, would write that he was badly damaged by relentless attacks on his womanizing after daring the press to catch him at it. It was not the nature of the criticism that did him in; it was what he did that invited the criticism. Is this not equally true of Kerry’s flip-flopping? (WaPo even tried to help Kerry out with this claim a few days ago.) For his part, Kerry has certainly tried hard to paint Bush as an untrustworthy flip-flopper as well, but that criticism doesn’t seem to have stuck. Is that only because his ads were no good?

Balz/Williams do acknowledge that Kerry’s problems “are partly of his own making,” but they imply, as least as I read what they say, that that part is pretty small:

Despite repeated efforts to flesh out his proposals on Iraq, terrorism and other issues, he has yet to break through to undecided voters as someone who has clear plans for fixing the country’s biggest problems.

One could say there’s no flesh because there are no bones, but that would be snide. (Accurate, but snide.) But it seems to me that Kerry’s problem is more substantial than the largely stylistic lack of persuasiveness presented here. He hasn’t been able to break through to undecided voters as someone who has clear plans because he doesn’t have clear plans. To say he can’t “break through” is to imply that the problem is the stubbornness, the brainwashedness by Bush ads, of the undecided voters, and thus is really blame-shifting rather than even “partly” Kerry’s fault.

Did Balz and Williams mean to give that impression?