"Barzini is dead. So is Phillip Tattaglia. Moe Green. Stracci. Cuneo."

Last night at Drinking Liberally, The Finest Minds of Our Generation ^[TM] were looking ahead to the election. "How many think Obama will win?" I asked. Most hands went up. (The rest, I assume, were dealing with their food.)

"How many think it'll be an electoral landslide?" I asked. Several hands hesitantly dropped, and most people looked at me like I was waving a 5-iron over my head in an electrical storm.

Here's a conversation I heard playing itself out in slightly different forms at least a half-dozen times during the evening:

"I really want to see a landslide, but I'm afraid if we get overconfident something will happen."

"Yeah, I remember 2004; I don't want to jinx this."

If you subscribe to the "jinx" theory, you might find this post by Kos from yesterday to be of interest. It will either brace your spirits, or turn your knees to jelly.

Because young Markos is all the other way:

[S]imple victory is not enough. If you want a radical departure from the governments we've suffered the last several decades, we must deliver a whipping the likes Republicans haven't seen in ages.

So he's not just hoping Please, Mister, may our candidate win?--he's got a list of targets that reads like the last reel of "The Godfather." He wants to settle all family business. Not just an electoral college landslide, and a veto-proof majority in the Senate, but the crushing, humiliating defeat of every Republican leader, in fact of every Republican who's ever crossed us: McConnell, Dole, Chambliss, Shadegg, and a bunch more, plus California Prop 8 and the Colorado "right to work" measure.

His argument:

So to my fellow movement progressives, embrace that killer instinct and let's finish the job. We've got conservatives demoralized and on the run. They are retrenching around their most important voices. So let's pick off those they've left exposed and go after their best defended leaders as well. Let's get rid of John Shadegg and Mitch McConnell and Liddy Dole and the rest of them. Leave them leaderless, and susceptible to takeover by the Evangelical Right that so freaked out Wall Street conservatives during the primaries (when Huckabee was briefly in the lead).

Let's run up Obama's margins in the Blue states and narrow them in the Red states to give Obama a huge, unmistakable national mandate. Let's win states Bush won by 20 points or so in 2004, like Indiana, Montana and North Dakota, to rub salt in their wounds. Let's keep forcing them to go more and more into debt, so that they emerge from the election with their coffers drained, heavily in debt.

Read the whole thing. I like the sound of it better than worrying about the 2004 "jinx."