Fiorina in the shadows after McCain, Palin comments

Don’t expect to see Carly Fiorina on television talking up her candidate, Sen. John McCain, for at least the next few days.

The public face of McCain’s economic policy has already canceled an appearance on CNN’s “American Morning” on Wednesday, and McCain aides said she might be hard to find on the remote for a few days.

The fade-out follows Fiorina’s statements Tuesday about both Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s and McCain’s fitness to run the company she once headed, Hewlett-Packard.

Speaking on the McGraw Milhaven Show on KTRS radio in St. Louis, Fiorina was praised by Milhaven as having worked her way up from being a secretary to being what some called the most powerful woman in business, before she was ousted from Hewlett-Packard. Milhaven went on to say that in tapping Palin, McCain “thinks she has the experience to be president.”

But, he continued, “Do you think she has the experience to run a major company like Hewlett-Packard?”

“No, I don’t,” Fiorina said.

But, added Fiorina, “that’s not what she is running for.”

Returning to the McCain campaign message, Fiorina went on to say she found it “quite stunning actually” that the Obama campaign was questioning Palin’s executive experience.

Later in the day, Fiorina went on TV to defend her comment, which was largely perceived to have been harmful to McCain while he is struggling to prove that he is the best steward of the nation’s troubled economy.

Appearing on MSNBC, she did not retract her remark but went on to add others to the list of people who also could not run Hewlett-Packard. Yes, they included Sen. Barack Obama and his Democratic running mate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., but they also included McCain, as well.

The Obama campaign could not have been more gleeful:

“If John McCain’s top economic adviser doesn’t think he can run a corporation,” said Tommy Vietor, an Obama spokesman, “how on Earth can he run the largest economy in the world in the midst of a financial crisis?”