Um... Logic?

Hillary Clinton says

"It's about picking a president who relies not just on words, but on work, hard work, to get America back to work," Clinton said at a labor rally here. "Someone who's not just in the speeches business."

Okay, let's do some formal logic. I'm going to do this sloppily and not state my assumptions, but it's all valid.

Two Democratic candidates, assume we pick one. We have a disjunction! Let's call this disjunction Democrat = [Obama OR Clinton]. For now we need not care if it's an OR or an XOR, but really it is XOR because only one will win the nomination. Using disjunction Democrat, from not Obama we can deduce Clinton. (Look up modus tollendo ponens.)

Unfortunately, I think Hillary is falling flat on this one. Why? Because her way of saying "not Obama," which I quoted above, could also be saying "not Clinton." There's nothing invalid about taking the argument in that direction, however; we can still get a valid result. For both inclusive and exclusive OR, when both arguments are false the disjunction is also false. So Democrat is false. The "spring" disjunction Democrat is one argument of the "November" disjunction [McCain OR Democrat]. With Democrat false, McCain is true.

Valid conclusion-- Clinton wants us to vote for McCain.

Of course, now that we know it's valid, we need to know if it's sound. (I made two mistakes that can ruin the soundness. Have fun finding them!)

[Nate back to add: And people told me that a semester of logic in the philosophy department at college would never be good for anything! Ha! Second best electives I ever took, after Coaching Football.]