Carly Fiorina, a senior McCain campaign adviser and former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, told a St. Louis radio station earlier today that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is unqualified to handle Fiorina’s old job. From Politico:

“Do you think she has the experience to run a major company like Hewlett Packard?” the host asked Fiorina.

“No, I don’t,” she replied. “But that’s not what she’s running for. Running a corporation is a different set of things.”

She then went back on the attack on Obama’s experience. (She probably wouldn’t want him running HP either.)

So Fiorina is not confident that Palin has enough executive experience to oversee HP’s 140,000 employees. But she is ready to assume command at a moment’s notice over the executive branch’s 1.6 million civilian employees, as well as another 1.4 million active-duty military personnel and all their weapons. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t strike me as a very reassuring endorsement.

Anyway, in a segment on Friday, a caller raised big questions about how Republicans can possibly seize the change mantle, if that means they’d have to clean up their own mess; while another suggested that the public is partly complicit in supporting a failing press.

Below are excerpts for interested readers:

Michael (Carmel Valley): Thank you, Peter. Hello, Ari. I just wanna make a couple quick comments about the Palin-McCain ticket, which I think, in some ways that’s what it’s become….one of the most important comments made during this campaign has gone almost under the radar, and it happens to be Jon Stewart interviewing Mike Huckabee—do you remember this one, where he [suggested] to Mike Huckabee that his position is basically, quote, “Our party is the only party that can clean up the mess made by our party.” And I think that’s the sort of thing we have got to get our arms around.

Ari: I think Michael’s right. I think that is the narrative that the Republicans settled on. But we should be careful here, in this sort of season of discontent, to understand that just as Democrats dislike it when politicians in the party move to the right — out of the perception that they can get votes that way, right or wrong — that worries the left.

Well, there is something positive for Barack Obama here, that after months of “Experience,” [and] “Ready to Lead” and “Country First” from the McCain campaign, they have settled here, in their final hours, on his message of “Change.” Now it’s working — that they’re co-opting part of it — and that Sarah Palin brought, as The New York Times put it, the “stamp of history to the ticket.” That’s not an insignificant thing — apart from ideology and apart from the lies we were discussing earlier.

But it also represents Democrats, for once, defining what is politically palpable and nationally desirable, and the trick for Obama is not to let it be co-opted. But they’re running on change because Obama made change universally desired in this electorate. That is something worth remembering…. they [now] value change over experience in their own politicking.

Pat (Humboldt): Hi Peter B. and Ari. The media will keep lying to us as long as we keep paying them to lie to us. As long as we subscribe to cable, as long as we subscribe to newspapers, they will keep lying to us…

Peter: Well, they’re trying to distract their way to the finish line, and some of it is working, right, Ari?

Ari: Yeah, I think distracting works. I think you’re right that there’s a market here, and if you can get away with it, it’s supported. There are changes–I was on Rachel Maddow’s radio show tonight before this. I think she’s great and I think she’s doing well with a marketable, successful show on television now. And then obviously, I’ll say it out of self-interest but not with any ambivalence, the places that I write for—The Nation, reader-supported since 1865 and not corporate; The Washington Independent, a different model but a non-profit, which allows us to do different things than corporate media. And you can go to those sites and support them any way you can. We appreciate it—it helps.

Bob Tkacz, a freelance reporter who’s covered the legislature and seafood industry since 1990, described Palin as willing to answer a couple questions while dropping her daughter, Piper, off at the bus stop, a stone’s throw from both the governor’s mansion and Capitol building.

“She’s very accessible,” said Tkacz. “I’m not sure that’s the same as open.”

Tkacz described her style in news conference to that of a PTA meeting, adding that Palin keeps to the script at most times. Another reporter described her as often having staffers nearby during such conferences to field questions, too…

Dermot Cole, a columnist and editorial board member of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, said that Palin has met with the paper’s editors several times, but has generally avoided meetings that involve deep discussion of policy and issues.

“She is the most reluctant of all the governors we’ve had to participate,” said Cole, who’s spent three decades at the paper. Therefore, Cole added, “I think it’s unproven how she’s going to handle this intense scrutiny.”

Calderone also quotes Judith Erickson, wife of the editor-at-large of the Alaska Oil and Legislative Report, who indicates Palin is likely to deflect questions for which she is unprepared:

Judith Erickson noted that Palin is a quick study, and it’s her personal appeal that could win over the press corps-even when the questions tread into areas she’s unlikely to be well-versed in.

In Alaska, Palin wouldn’t have been asked to locate Afghanistan on a map, but now will be expected to answer more nuanced foreign-policy questions, as well as be prepared on domestic issues like the economy.

“She’s really good at the non-answer,” Judith Erickson said. “If you ask a question that she doesn’t want to answer, she just gives up a response that’s unresponsive. I have a feeling that she’ll do a lot of that.”

Of course, it may be more than a little naive to assume that Palin will spend much time talking to the press. We’ve written extensively about the lack of access the McCain campaign has given the national media recently — McCain has not held a press conference in nearly three weeks. In that time, the only questions he has answered have been in one-on-one interviews, mostly with local media.

I’ve been on the road with McCain the entire time since he announced Palin as his running mate, and I have yet to be within a couple hundred feet of her. The only time I’ve seen her face has been on television or on the Jumbo-trons at the rally in Dayton, Ohio, where McCain made the announcement. Palin also has yet to take a question from any reporter since her selection, local or national. Perhaps with good reason.

The McCain campaign is clearly uncomfortable allowing even the presumed GOP nominee — a seasoned politician who built his career and his reputation on “straight talk” with the press — to face the media. They’re probably not too keen on putting Palin out there, without a net, in front of reporters eager to test her qualifications for the nation’s second-highest office. One fumbled answer to a hardball question on, say, foreign policy — which, by the way, any other vice presidential candidate would be expected to answer — could prove devastating when played over and over on cable news channels, let alone a series of them. I expect Palin’s role in the campaign will be to appear at rallies, mostly in battleground states, and to interact with the press as little as possible — just like her running mate.