Can you point me to some successful political ads that discussed all the screw ups and scandals of the candidate it was supporting?
None spring immediately to mind, no... but, then: that's precisely my point. ;) He's taking what is, by any yardstick, a highly UNconventional approach to begin with, in confessing (however obliquely) his incredibly flawed nature as a potential presidential aspirant.
The fact that it's only a halfway measure, quite frankly, strikes me as being the very worst of all possible worlds: "I have some genuinely unsavory skeletons in my past... but: they're not the sorts of things we really ought to be discussing candidly, out in the bright light of day." ;) If it turns out that I'm wrong on this one... well, then: I'm wrong. We'll certainly see soon enough, won't we...?