Secretary of State Marco Rubio proudly watched as his daughter Daniella introduced him Friday ahead of a major post-election address.
“Was that cool or what?” Rubio said enthusiastically after her remarks at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention.
“I don’t know where she got this,” he added, marveling at her confidence. “There’s no stage fright. She’s not afraid to speak. I don’t really like public speaking that much, but she, on the other hand—that’s fantastic.”
Daniella, a third-year law student at the University of Virginia, is Rubio’s youngest daughter. He and his wife, Jeanette, have four children—two sons and two daughters.
When another law student asked how Americans could “instill the values to the next generation of love for our freedom,” as he had with Daniella, Rubio answered with a joke: “Well, my home was not a democracy.”
The secretary of state quickly clarified that he was “not the dictator” of the family, but instead served as its “minister of defense.”
Rubio’s speech, his first since Republicans suffered sweeping losses in last week’s midterm elections, carried an upbeat and forward-looking message.
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He urged the conservative audience to remember the “devastating losses” Republicans endured during the 1982 midterm elections under former President Ronald Reagan.
“Less than two years into Ronald Reagan’s first term in office, everything sort of seemed headed in the wrong direction,” Rubio said. “It’s hard for us to remember that right now, but that’s what it was like.”
Rubio called on Republicans to take a longer view and focus on goals beyond the next election.
“We have much more to do over the next two, the next six, the next 20 years,” he said. “Great things that last are built in decades, not election cycles.”
“There will be more victories, and there will be more defeats. There will be more triumphs, and there will be more disappointments. This is the nature of all undertakings of this weight and of this magnitude,” Rubio continued.
“There are no great men or great causes in the pages of history that did not suffer the same,” he said defiantly. “But we are persuaded of the justice of our cause, and we too will triumph in the end.”
