Washington - Seconds before he won the title of national Republican chairman, Michael S. Steele turned to his sister, Monica, who was standing at his side in the crowded Capital Hilton ballroom, and grinned.
"We're going to have some fun," he told her.
A sunny, magnetic personality helped Steele capture the job, and that upbeat image may be his most potent weapon in motivating a beleaguered party organization.
Steele brings badly needed diversity to a national party that, according to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, just had its worst showing among minority voters in 150 years. But that is only one of the challenges Steele will confront in his new position.
Out of power in Washington and down in the polls, Republicans have sunk to their lowest point, politically, in decades.
In the view of some leading party strategists, the future looks even bleaker than it did in the dark days after Watergate. Less than two weeks into Democrat Barack Obama's presidency, they worry that it could easily take until the second half of the next decade for the party to be in a position to reclaim power.
For Maryland's former lieutenant governor, those low expectations represent a great opportunity. He's taken command of a party with nowhere to go but up.
Steele sees his national mission as no more improbable than the 2002 election that brought him and Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. into office in heavily Democratic Maryland.
He plans to lay a new foundation and develop new relationships for his party, even though he knows it won't produce a turnaround overnight.
"I've been in elections before that I've lost where I've actually won," he said, with characteristic optimism, in an interview yesterday. "I would say my [2006] Senate race, even though I lost that seat, we won, because I had crossover appeal with African-Americans and Democrats. That was a huge success, given where we had been in the past, getting the percentage of the black vote in Maryland that I did."
Along the same lines, Steele said he doesn't want to be judged on just the number of elections won or millions of dollars raised during the next two years. He wants to make progress with small donors as well as fat cats. He's seeking gains among voters, including minorities, who have shunned Republican candidates in growing numbers at the national level.
Steele said he is "looking beneath the surface [at] the nuances of winning and losing elections, like how we've improved our standing with certain communities."
One of his biggest challenges, he said, will be convincing Republican voters "that we're serious about moving this party in a different and new direction."
During informal remarks yesterday to members of the Republican National Committee, he alluded to the overarching message of his selection as the first African-American Republican chairman, thanking them for putting "a new face on this party."
His historic election, which drew international attention, was also widely interpreted as a Republican repudiation of the Bush era.
News accounts took note of Steele's past efforts to distance himself from Bush during the Maryland Senate race, when he criticized the administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war.
But in the interview, Steele recounted, with evident pride, receiving congratulatory phone calls from leading party politicians, including "both President Bushes," on Friday evening.
In addition, "President Obama tried to reach out, so I was very excited about that," said Steele, adding that the two had not yet made contact.
The Marylander appears to see no downside in his new job, won after an extensive two-month campaign that capped a rise in party ranks, which started years ago in overwhelmingly Democratic Prince George's County, still his home.
Party leaders said they chose Steele in large measure to act as a national spokesman. His status as a Fox News celebrity was a major selling point in his campaign, and he's scheduled to make his national TV debut as chairman on Fox News Sunday this morning.
Yesterday, he made a hastily arranged trip to the Homestead resort, in Hot Springs, Va., where he got an enthusiastic welcome from a crowd of House Republicans at the closing address of a three-day retreat, which featured appearances by several of the party's past and future presidential contenders.
Steele told them he was "in the business of winning elections," and pointed to three this year as his first tests. They include governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey and a special election in New York's Republican-leaning 20th Congressional District, vacated by the appointment of Democratic Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to Hillary Clinton's former Senate seat.
He also poked fun at himself, saying that "as a black Roman Catholic conservative from Washington, D.C., and Maryland, I know how to lose elections."
