I’ve long had a deep interest in politics. I spent most of my reporting career interviewing mayors, governors, senators and presidential candidates.
I’ve covered nearly every election since Billy Fleming let me cover the elections for the Early County News when I was in high school. I love the adrenaline of election night.
I had left journalism and was working in public relations in 2002 when Sonny Perdue – a man I knew and had covered extensively in Houston County – ran for and won election as governor of Georgia. I was miserable, sitting at home on election night and not out covering the story. By 2006, I was back in a newsroom.
I can still remember when the political bug bit me. It was 1976. Jimmy Carter, had announced he was running for president, and the thought that a Georgian could become president fascinated me. I was just 12, so the difference between a liberal and a conservative was a bit of a mystery for me.
But I got caught up in the process. I followed all the primaries. I became mesmerized by the conventions. That year, the Democrats met in Madison Square Garden in New York City.
I loved the speeches and the reactions they’d get from the delegates. I loved the delegates with their funny hats. I loved the tens of thousands of balloons that dropped from the ceiling when Carter accepted the nomination of his party.
But I particularly liked watching the TV reporters, running around on the convention floor, trying to find delegates and other officials to talk to. I decided that week that I wanted to cover a political convention at some point in my career.
I reached that goal in 1988, just a couple of years after I graduated from college, when the Democrats came to Atlanta to nominate Michael Dukakis. I was young and I was inexperienced, so I didn’t get good assignments inside The Omni. Mostly I covered things that were happening outside, like the many protests.
But I was there. And I loved every minute of it.
Now 28 years later, I’m going back, this time to cover the Republicans. AccessWDUN is sending me and a colleague, Joel Williams, to Cleveland next week to cover the Republican National Convention, where Donald Trump, presumably, will get the nomination.
Joel and I will be co-hosting a live, two-hour talk program from Radio Row each morning from 9-11 a.m. and producing segments for our morning and afternoon news programs.
In addition, I’ll be writing blogs and sharing photographs of the sights and sounds of Cleveland during convention week. I’ve already set up an interview at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame to talk about an exhibit there about the connection between rock music and politics.
Twenty years ago, I interviewed NBC News correspondent John Chancellor on the eve of his last political convention before he retired. He bemoaned that fact that conventions had become little more than four-day infomercials for the political parties. The candidates long decided, there were no debates about the platform or any issues. It was packaged. It was pretty. It was perfect.
“They are about as exciting today as the Miss America pageant,” Chancellor told me.
I wish he were alive today to see Donald Trump.
I don’t think the Stop Trump movement has a chance for success. But with Donald Trump as the candidate, you know it won’t be boring.
I can’t wait.
