Secretary of State Marco Rubio beamed with pride Friday after his daughter Daniella introduced him before a major post-election speech.
“Was that cool or what?” Rubio gushed after his daughter’s remarks at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention.
“I don’t know where she got this,” he marveled. “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 has four children, two boys and two girls, with his wife Jeanette.
When asked by another law student in the crowd how Americans can “instill the values to the next generation of love for our freedom” as he has with his Daniella, Rubio quipped: “Well, my home was not a democracy.”
The secretary of state was also quick to note that he was “not the dictator” of the family, but rather, “the minister of defense.”
Rubio’s speech, his first since Republicans were wiped out by a Democratic blue wave in last week’s midterm elections, struck an optimistic tone.
He reminded the conservative audience about the “devastating losses” Republicans suffered in 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 encouraged current Republicans to look at the big picture and think long term.
“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.”
