Long days at GOP convention will bring in-depth Valley views

I’ve covered the Republican and Democratic national conventions since 2004.

But I’ve done so from the comfort of my desk at The Vindicator working the phones and watching the event on television.

I only have to worry about the cellphone batteries of local delegates running low when I call to get comments and reactions to their experiences at the convention. Honestly, it’s also a lot easier not to be there.

While it works well, I miss out on the experience of being at the convention.

Beginning Monday, I’m going to see if there’s a difference between covering the convention in person and doing it by phone.

One big difference is I’ll be getting up ridiculously early to get to Cleveland for the Ohio delegations’ breakfast gatherings that start at 8 a.m. except Wednesday. On that day, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan will address the delegation starting at 7:30 a.m.

To get there on time each day, Bertram de Souza, editorial page editor/columnist and my convention running buddy, and I are going to be leaving The Vindicator daily between 5 and 5:30 a.m.

With convention sessions ending around 11 p.m. every night, we’re looking at four very long days of running all over Cleveland in the middle of the summer.

I’ll be skipping the post- convention festivities, or I won’t get any sleep – not that I’m going to get that much.

Ryan is the biggest name scheduled to speak to the Ohio delegation, and the breakfast meetings should generate a lot of news.

But perhaps the most interesting event on the calendar for the Ohio delegates – and the only nonbreakfast event for them on the official schedule that’s open to the media – will be a Tuesday reception for Gov. John Kasich.

While Kasich’s presidential campaign flopped, he is certainly expected to be treated like a rock star at the event appropriately taking place at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Kasich has refused to endorse Donald Trump, who will be officially named the Republican presidential nominee at the convention, and won’t step foot inside the convention.

His event will attract a Who’s Who of Ohio Republicans, but also expect several national GOP leaders attending the convention to be there as well.

During the Republican primaries, there was a lot of talk about this being a contested convention with a floor fight for the presidential nomination.

The talk was rather silly as it became fairly obvious after a few weeks to those who weren’t blindly backing a candidate other than Trump that he would get the needed delegates to be the party’s nominee.

As for a first in-person convention, I couldn’t have asked for a more interesting and improbable one even without it being contested.

We’ve only found out some of the details, most notably who’s speaking at the convention, in the past few days because Trump has turned the event upside down.

A Thursday email from the RNC to the media read: “Donald Trump is an unconventional candidate and there are unconventional people who will take the stage next week – people who haven’t been part of the political process. This is representative of the candidate and representative of what we’ve seen from the electorate this election cycle. People want something different.”

Trump has promised a unique convention, complaining that previous ones have been boring.

“I’m going to go there expecting the unexpected,” said Mark Munroe, an alternate delegate and the Mahoning County Republican Party chairman.

I hope Trump delivers though I also hope the potential for violence doesn’t occur. I’m too old to be running toward riots and likely too old to run away from them.

Bertram and I will be putting in long days to provide comprehensive coverage of the convention for our readers. That means detailed Valley-specific articles and columns every day in the newspaper, and a ton of social media activity during the convention.

We’ll be on Twitter, Facebook and Vindy.com with news, interesting tidbits and video. Neither Bertram nor I has ever shot video so cut us some slack – at least for the first few days. And this is assuming the available bandwidth allows all of our work to get to your computers and phones easily.

It certainly will be an adventure.

As for the following week, I won’t be going to Philadelphia for the Democratic National Convention. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be doing our best to provide in-depth coverage of that historic event. It will be done my more traditional way: working the phones and watching it on TV on enough sleep.

Fortunately, there are plenty of representatives from the Mahoning Valley going to the DNC to provide their insight.