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In the Spotlight: Wake's Allan Louden is the source that people call during debate season
Journal Photo by David Rolfe
Allan Louden, an associate professor of communications, is an expert on debate preparation and strategy.
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Published: October 15, 2008
The phone is ringing in Allan Louden's office.
Again.
It could be reporters from the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper in Brazil, the Daily Pravda in Slovakia or The Scotsman newspaper in Edinburgh.
Since January, all of them have contacted Louden, who studies political communications, to pick his brain about the presidential election. This morning Louden will do a debate segment with Fox Business Network's Money for Breakfast between 7 and 8 a.m., he said.
With debate season ending after tonight's presidential debate, Louden, an associate professor of communications at Wake Forest University, can move on to his other interest: political advertising. He's pretty sure that the calls will keep coming, he said.
But the former farm boy from Montana is low-key about the attention. He will watch tonight's debate at home with his golden retriever, Wyoming.
"It's fairly ephemeral. I understand that," he said, of his comments for news stories around the world. "There are so many voices out there. I'm not sure when it really contributes and when it's filler."
About half of his callers are seeking his dispassionate academic's voice to lend legitimacy to their stories, he said. The rest of the callers want to learn something about debating or political advertising.
In addition to commenting for about 50 media outlets -- and counting -- this election season, Louden writes an occasional blog for The Charlotte Observer and is one of three bloggers for DebateScoop.org, which covers races all over the country.
Louden brings a rare perspective to his commentary, said Jarrod Atchison, a former student of Louden's. Atchison is an assistant professor of speech communications and director of debate at Trinity University in San Antonio.
Louden combines the scholarly study of presidential debates with the practical skills that come from having developed one of the country's premier college debate programs, Atchison said.
"His commentary is less focused on, ‘Did someone get in a zinger?' and it's based on the strategy that both debaters need to win," Atchison said.
Louden doesn't come across as a partisan hack because he understands the complex preparation that goes into debates and he focuses more on debate techniques than on personalities and one-liners, Atchison said.
A high-school English teacher recommended that Louden go into debating as a cure for his shyness, Louden said. He was on the debate team at Montana State University, where he got a degree in government. He thought he was headed for law school when a professor brought up the idea of his going on to study debate in graduate school.
He took that advice readily, he said, and was relieved that he could study something he truly enjoyed.
But it took a while for the rest of the country to catch up with Louden's interest.
When he had his first job as an assistant professor of speech communications and forensics at Northwest Community College, no one called about the debates. News was local, he said.
In the 1980s, when Louden had come to Wake Forest to teach, the big media event was inviting his students to his house to watch the debate. He said he would get maybe one call from a local television or newspaper.
The turning point came in 1988, Louden said, when one of the debates between presidential candidates George Bush and Michael Dukakis was held at Wake Forest. "There were as many interviews as you had time to do," he said. "Everyone wanted something local to prove they were here."
With the Internet's reach, comes even more exposure.
When he published his first blog entry about the election, he got 7,000 hits in the first couple of hours, he said.
Being in the spotlight can have its drawbacks, he said.
In academia, critics are generally polite when they disagree with one's work, Louden said.
As a blogger, he's been called everything from a "conservative hack" to a "campus Marxist."
He takes the expressions of pique from both extremes as a sign that he's falling somewhere in the middle, he said.
"You get this dialogue going. There are hundreds of people commenting," he said. "They really want to argue with each other to make a point."
■ Mary Giunca can be reached at 727-4089 or at mgiunca@wsjournal.com.
Louden's debate insight
Final debates tend to disappear quickly from the news cycle, says Allan Louden, an expert on debates. That said, here are some things to look for in tonight's debate:
1. Sen. John McCain is likely to be more direct and go after Sen. Barack Obama, particularly on his policies. That means there may be fireworks.
2. Moderator Bob Schieffer tends to ask stock questions, but likes to throw in some unexpected ones to see how the candidates think on their feet.
3. Both candidates are likely to hit their main themes.
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