Marco Rubio Election acceptance (victory) speech 11/02/10 TEXT VIDEO

Marco Rubio Election acceptance (victory) speech 11/02/10 VIDEO

Marco Rubio Wins Florida Senate Race. Republican Marco Rubio defeated Democrat Kendrick Meek and Charlie Crist in Florida's three-way Senate race. Rubio called the election results a "second chance" for Republicans.

FULL TEXT TRANSCRIPT:

Thank you so much. Thank you. About an hour and a half ago, I received two very gracious phone calls. Governor Crist called me to congratulate. And I thank him for that gracious phone call.

Congressman Meek called to congratulate and I told him that he has given us a lesson in dignity and in strength.

And I thank both of them for being worthy opponents in a difficult campaign. And I wanted to thank all of you for all the help you’ve given me as well.

Let me begin tonight by acknowledging a simple but profound truth. We are all children of a powerful and great God. Of a God who isn’t always going to end – things are not always going to end up the way you want them. His will is not always going to be yours.

But I promise you this. No matter what you face in life, he will give you the strength to go through it. I bear witness to that tonight as so many of you do in your own lives and must always be acknowledged in everything we do and everywhere we go.

I don’t even know how to begin how to describe this journey but to thank so many of you that have been a part of this. And we’ll talk about little tidbits of that in a moment.

Clearly I’m grateful to my family. To my wife, Jeanette, who has made this possible. Raising children under any circumstances is a two-person job but she has done it alone for the last two years. I owe her a debt of gratitude I will never be able to repay. I am blessed to have her as my wife and I am grateful that she is with us here today.

I am also blessed with four children who remind me every day of what’s important in life but also give me the strength even throughout this campaign. There was a moment early in this campaign where I didn’t know how I was going to raise the money to be competitive.

And I’ll never forget that the next morning my children showed up, they had collected their allowance, which was largely quarters and single-dollar bills, and handed it to me. I didn’t tell them that. They overheard me.

And it was in that moment that I was reminded of what this race and election was really all about. It was not about any of our individual ambitions but it was about the future, as represented by them and their generation.

And that lesson is profound. It’s one that I will not soon forget.

Tomorrow or even now, the stories are being written about what this election is about. What does it mean? And we still don’t know all the results from around this country.

But we know that tonight, the power in the United States House of Representatives will change hands. We know tonight that a growing number of Republicans will now serve in the Senate as well. And we make a grave mistake if we believe that tonight these results are somehow an embrace of the Republican Party.

What they are is a second chance. A second chance for Republicans to be what they said they were going to be not so long ago. You see, I learned early on in this campaign – in fact it’s what propelled me to enter it – that what this race was about was about the great future that lies ahead for our country, a future that Americans know is there for the taking. But it requires actions on our part.

Americans believe with all their heart, the vast majority of them, and the vast majority of Floridians, that the United States of America is simply the single greatest nation in all of human history, a place without equal in the history of all mankind.

But we also know that something doesn’t seem right. Our nation is headed in the wrong direction and both parties are to blame. And what Americans are looking for desperately are people that will go to Washington, D.C., and stand up to this agenda that is taking us in the wrong direction and offer a clear and genuine alternative.

And that’s what this race was about early on for me. And that’s what it’s about tonight. It is about the future of this country and what it will look like when our children are our age. Now let me tell you, there are those out there that doubt about the greatness of America. Sometimes when I say it, I hear the snickers from some in different parts. They think it’s simplistic.

But see, I know America’s great not because I read about it in a book, but because I’ve seen it with my eyes. I’ve been raised in a community of exiles, a people who lost their country, a people who know what it’s like to live somewhere else. By the way, a community that I am proud to be a part of – a community of men and women that were once my age. And when they were, they had dreams like we have now. And yet, they lost all those things through an accident of history.

So they came here to try to rebuild their lives. And some did. But many others could not. And instead, it became the purpose of their life to leave their children with the opportunities they themselves did not have. This is the story of the Cuban exile community. And it defines what so many of us who are a product of it are.

And I know this, no matter where I go or what title I may achieve, I will always be the son of exiles.

And we will always be the heirs of two generations of unfulfilled dreams. The other way that I know about America’s greatness is the story of a man that I knew well, of someone who wasn’t born in this country. When he was six years old, he lost his mother. When he was 12, he lost his father.

He grew up largely in a society where what you were going to be when you grew up was decided for you. This is like almost every other place in the world. Think about what that means. That means that before you are even born, how far you are going to get to go in life is decided for you by who your parents are or are not.

And that’s how it is almost everywhere in the world. And this is how it was for that man. He was fortunate enough to make it here to America where he was never able to capture his own dreams of his own youth.

Instead, he made it the mission of his life to ensure that his children would have every opportunity he did not, that every door that was closed for him would be open to them, that the day would never come for them that came for him, the day when he realized that his own dreams would not be possible.

And so now, life was about opening the pathways for his children. This story I know well and it verifies to me the greatness of our country because, tonight, with your vote you have elected his son to the United States Senate.

But you see, although that’s our story, it’s not exclusive to us. In fact, at this very moment, it is playing out within walking distance of this very place. Tonight, all across this state and all across this country, there are people working hard to ensure that their children would have a better opportunity in this life than they have had themselves. And they are blessed to live in this great and extraordinary society, where indeed that dream is still possible and is still true.

This is our story. But our story says more about our country than it does about us. And it is what we are fighting to protect and preserve for the generations to come. It’s what this election’s been about for me from the very beginning. You see, when you’re 35 points down in the polls, and the only people who think you can win live in your house, and four of them are under the age of 10, you better know why you’re running.

When you have to drive four hours to get back home after speaking to 50 people and it’s 1:30 in the morning and the Garmin says there’s still an hour and a half to go and you’re not sure how you’re going to stay awake, you better know why you’re running.

And I found the strength in this campaign to move forward on days where I was not sure if I should or could, from tokens of extraordinary kindness from every corner of this state.

Sometimes it happened when I was at a restaurant, maybe meeting with some folks and thought, maybe this is the last day of this campaign, maybe I made the wrong choice. And just like that, someone would appear and encourage me to continue. Other times it came in the form of $25 checks in the mail from a single mother or an elderly person, a senior, on a fixed income.

Each and every time that we thought this campaign had run its course, something like that would happen to remind us that this race was never about me or about us. But it was about the fact that we are privileged and blessed to be citizens of this extraordinary society, and that that is something worth fighting for. That we have the opportunity to ensure that our children and grandchildren are the freest and most prosperous Americans that ever lived.

If only we are willing to do what the Americans that came before us did: to stand up and confront the great challenges of our time. To say as those who came before us said: that we will not leave our problems for our children unresolved. We will not allow them to inherit our debt and our mistakes. But rather that we will do whatever we must do to ensure that for them, life will be better than for us, that for them, our country will be better than the one we inherited, that tomorrow will be greater than today, that our history will surpass our heritage.

This has been the story of this extraordinary land for two hundred and thirty-some odd years. And tonight, at this crossroads at which we stand, we are asked to choose whether it will continue to be our story moving forward.

For before us lies two very different roads. One road is the road that Washington and both parties have placed us on. It is a road of politicians that will say or do anything to win the next election, but are unwilling to tackle the issues of our time. It is the road of those who are in politics to be somebody, not to do something. It is the road of those, perhaps the first generation in our history, willing to allow their children to inherit all their mistakes and all the things that went wrong. And that, tragically, is the road that we are on right now.

But there’s another road. It is the road that I hope we will begin to walk on again tonight. It is a road that says our children deserve to inherit the greatest society in all of human history. It is a road that understands that the world is a safer and better place when America is the strongest country in the world. It is a road that realizes that there is still at least one place on this planet where it doesn’t matter if your dad was a bartender and your mom was a maid. You can accomplish anything you want if you’re willing to work hard for it and play by the rules.

In a few short days, I will have the extraordinary privilege and honor of joining the United States Senate. But I do so with my eyes wide open. I understand that Washington is a place where we’ve sent people before, and they don’t come back the same way we sent them. It is a place that literally changes people, and within a short period of time, they forgot why they even ran.

And so, tonight, I ask for your prayers for me and for my family that we will not change, that we will always remember what carried us on those lonely days when few believed that this day would come, that we will always remember the things we cared about on this night, that I will constantly carry on my back the obligation that comes with knowing that I represent more than just those who voted for me today, but the millions of Floridians who did not but deserve to be represented in the U.S. Senate as well.

And that ultimately, what this is all about stands before us, even as we speak. It is about whether we are going to be the first generation of Americans to leave our children worse off than ourselves, or the next generation that allow them to inherit what they deserve, inherit what we inherited, give to them what every generation before us has given to the next, the single greatest nation in all of human history.

God bless you, thank you, and God bless America.

VIDEO and TEXT CREDIT: MarcoRubio