Mikey Kaus and Multiple Audiences

Saw this bit in the Kaus Files today that shows the importance of understanding the different relationships you're in and how a message for one can impact the other:

Obama has been out every day reminding those of us in the middle how far to the left he is from where he ran in 2008. He's firming up the wrong base.

Its amazing that the Blues don't understand that all BHO's comments, particularly the punish your enemies meme, are on FOX, talk radio and the Internet. Your trash talk goes right into the other guy's locker room.

... the "locker room" analogy is slightly misleading. It's not just that rousing the Dem base also rouses the GOP base (which can hardly be roused more than it already is anyway). It's that rousing the Dem base alienates the middle.

Were Dems always faced with that base-vs.-middle tradeoff?

On issues like immigration reform, it seems like they are now. (Welfare was a base-vs.-middle issue, of course. The middle hated welfare. But Dems could always soft-pedal and hide their cash-dispensing programs in the fine print while pretending that they were requiring work—and then relying on other issues to mobilize the base. On immigration, it seems as if the only way to rouse the Dems' Latino base, Obama-style, is to shout your support for an immigration amnesty from the rooftops, where the middle can also hear it.)