ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Speaking to a crowd gathered in midday June heat at Waterfront Park on Friday, Carly Fiorina opened her keynote for Sails on the Potomac with a claim she would spend the next several minutes defending: that the United States is unlike any other nation because it was founded not on ethnicity, territory or religion, but on ideas.
“When we as Americans do not know our history, we don’t know why we are a nation,” said Fiorina, who serves as honorary chair of the Virginia 250th Commission. She told the audience that ideas “can move the world” — and that a country built on them is fragile when its citizens forget what those ideas were, recalling her own college studies in history and philosophy.
Fiorina led Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005, becoming the first woman to head a Fortune 20 company, and later ran for the U.S. Senate in California in 2010 and for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. In April, she was named chief executive of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, where she had chaired the board since 2020. She and her husband live in Mason Neck, along the Potomac.
A date with meaning
Fiorina anchored the speech in the calendar. She noted that the gathering fell on June 12, the same date in 1775 that, by her account, George Mason penned the Virginia Declaration of Rights — a document she said became a model for Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and, later, for the Bill of Rights. Both Mason and Jefferson were Virginians, she reminded the crowd, as she built toward the line that would become the speech’s refrain…