Hillary’s first national ad plays the victim card

The Hillary Clinton presidential campaign is capitalizing on recent remarks by Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the man who would be speaker, that seemed to imply a political motive behind the House committee that is investigating the Benghazi attacks.

The campaign’s first national ad plays up the Hillary-is-a-victim-of-partisan-congressional-committees angle:

Most initial national ad buys, as HotAir’s Allahpundit correctly points out, are used to introduce a candidate or (as one might assume in Hillary’s case) give a softer look to a well-known and highly divisive candidate.

We all knew this kind of argument would be made, but why make it in the very first national ad buy? Usually that gets used to introduce a candidate, to allow her to define herself. This only defines Hillary as a victim, and an ersatz one at that. McCarthy’s comments aside, the FBI probe into exposure of classified material through the secret Hillary server isn’t a partisan witch hunt.

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Of course, Hillary needs no introduction after nearly a quarter-century on the national stage, but that’s also a curious point. Her track record shows that she didn’t need the select committee to end up with bad favorability numbers in this election. Why not spend the money on trying to shore up her image with a soft-focus summation of her most appealing aspects?

Allahpundit and others think they have an idea. Hillary needs to convince her own Democratic Party that her campaign isn’t a disaster: “That’s why she wants to lead off as a victim of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Mark IV — to shame them into rallying to her defense and abandoning the myriad of better options.”

No word whether Vice President Joe Biden has seen the ad.