On Thursday night, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will square off in a debate in California.

If it gets testy, Obama will need some better zingers than his rather weak shot at Sen. Clinton in the last debate, when he told her that “you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board of Wal-Mart” when he was working the streets of Chicago as a community organizer.

Now, I know Wal-Mart is a bad word in some Democratic circles, but how lame is that?

As I watched, I thought it’s too bad Democrats spent so much time trashing Kenneth Starr, the Clinton-era Whitewater independent counsel, because Starr’s investigators gathered a vast trove of material that today would be a great source of opposition research on the Clintons.

Prosecutors never charged Mrs. Clinton with breaking any laws, but their work left no doubt that she sometimes had a shaky relationship with the truth, even when testifying under oath.

Exhibit A — still available on the Web — is the independent counsel’s report on the White House Travel Office firings.

In 1993, the new first lady pushed hard for mass firings in the office, getting rid of longtime employees so Clinton buddies could get a piece of the White House press corps travel business.

She told David Watkins, the aide whose job it was to actually lower the boom on the workers, “Well, you know we need to have our people in there,” according to Watkins’s testimony.

She pressured then-chief of staff Mack McLarty to fire the workers, and together, Watkins and McLarty felt Mrs. Clinton breathing down their necks. Watkins wrote, but did not send, a memo to McLarty saying they both “knew that there would be hell to pay if … we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the first lady’s wishes.”

All that is pretty clear. But in 1995, when Mrs. Clinton was questioned under oath about the matter, she told a different story.

“Who ultimately made the decision, to the extent that you know, to fire the employees from the Travel Office?” investigators asked.

“Well, the best I know is David Watkins and Mack McLarty, I assume, based on what I have learned since and read in the newspapers,” Mrs. Clinton answered.

“Did you have any role in it?”

“No, I did not.”

“Did you have any input with either Mr. McLarty or Mr. Watkins as to that decision?”

“I don’t believe I did, no.”

That testimony was not true by any stretch of the imagination. “The evidence is sufficient to establish beyond a reasonable doubt,” the independent counsel concluded, “that Mrs. Clinton had a ‘role’ in the Travel Office firings and that she had ‘input’ into that decision.

“Her testimony to the contrary was factually false.”

In the end, prosecutors decided they might not be able to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that Mrs. Clinton knew her answers were false.

That’s hard to believe if you’ve read the report, but prosecutors had to operate under a pretty high standard of proof, especially considering they were dealing with a first lady.

Now, however, we’re in the rough-and-tumble of a political campaign.

Barack Obama doesn’t have to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt — especially if there is overwhelming evidence to support his charges.

It’s too bad such topics seem off-limits in Democratic circles, because the next time Sen. Clinton talks about her White House experience, it would be nice to hear what she has to say about this.

York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it