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."
