Fox News' Brian Kilmeade is not the person one would expect to knock down a disingenuous attack on President Obama. Indeed, Kilmeade is as enthusiastic a GOP shill as anyone else on his network and isn't exactly known for his piercing insight. And yet this morning he provided a concise and effective rebuttal to the Daily Caller's Drudge-hyped video of President Obama using “racially charged rhetoric” in a 2007 speech: whatever Obama said, noted Kilmeade, he hasn't “governed in a racist way.”

It's an important point that gets right to the heart of why the Daily Caller's video was, to borrow from Ta-Nehisi Coates, a nothing-burger slathered in weak sauce. The president has nearly four years' worth of policies upon which to judge him. The constant refrain from the conservative media during this election cycle has been that Obama doesn't want to talk about his policy record, and is instead trying to “distract” voters with issues unrelated to his performance as president. Now these same conservatives are pounding their fists, rending their garments, and letting the spittle fly over a video of Obama shot more than a year before he became president, arguing that it's disqualifying of the office he holds.

This urge among conservatives to refight the 2008 election is as futile as it is bizarre, premised as it is on the existence of a secret video or document from Obama's “hidden” past that will expose the moderate Democrat as the hardcore left-wing radical they already believe him to be. But as Kilmeade pointed out, Obama's actual policy record -- the only thing that actually matters -- provides no proof of that alleged radicalism. Thus conservatives are put in the paradoxical situation of relying more and more heavily on “secret” videos and documents from Obama's past that become less relevant with each passing day of the Obama presidency.

And so the hunt for the “real” Barack Obama continues. It's a hopeless quest, but one that's unlikely to change.