Ask most Republicans about Benghazi and they’ll pay lip service to the September 11, 2012 attacks in Libya that killed four Americans. But in an an unprompted defense of his party’s record in Congress, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy—the odds-on favorite to replace John Boehner as speaker when he retires at the end of October—admitted what everybody knows, but no Republican is supposed to say out loud: that the GOP’s Benghazi fixation has always been designed to damage Hillary Clinton.

"Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?" McCarthy pleaded to Sean Hannity on Fox News on Tuesday night. "But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she's untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought."

The political world reacted as if McCarthy had accidentally handed Democrats a gift. But it wasn’t a gaffe; it was a talking point. Earlier the same day, McCarthy made a nearly identical boast about the Benghazi committee’s political effectiveness to CNN’s Jake Tapper.

“[I]t’s not just a policy," he said. "It's also a media. And people have to join that. So, that's why, within a select committee—think of this. When you look at poll numbers of Hillary Clinton, they have dropped. Unfavorables pretty high, because people say they don't trust her. They don't trust her because of what they found out about the server and everything else. Would you ever have found that out had you not gathered the information from the Benghazi Select Committee?”

Democrats were elated to hear McCarthy admit the obvious so candidly, and most of them seem to believe that McCarthy is a Boehner clone, who comes with an entertaining side of unthinking goofiness as a bonus. But viewed in a wider context, it’s easier to interpret McCarthy’s remarks as a promise to restive conservatives that he’ll be a more ruthless and distasteful political operator—and more solicitous of the reactionary right—than his predecessor. McCarthy’s shoring up support in a way that should give Boehner second thoughts about his decision to resign.