Here’s my morning sum-up (written, uh, at 7:30 p.m.) of What Happened Yesterday on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I’ll have the text of the Lieberman amendment available for linkage imminently. Until then, I think it’s important to remember two things.

First: the press is kind of going nuts with the White House acquiescence on letting repeal go forward. Yes, it’s a big deal. But like I wrote last night, now all the actual legislating needs to happen and the crucial votes need to occur and the measures have to pass and Obama has to sign and the Pentagon working group has to report and the Defense Department has to implement. The major LGBT groups who played a crucial-to-decisive role in getting us here are gearing up this week for a major vote fight. Major. Millions of dollars, thousands of phone calls and postcards to member offices, hundreds of in-district rallies around the country. No one should act like DeSean Jackson.

Second: I want to stick up for Secretary Gates and Adm. Mullen for a moment. The stakes are very high and, appropriately, so are passions. But there’s been an unfortunate tendency at times to exaggerate or overestimate some of the differences here, and so now that the contours of an agreement are in place — if not the actual repeal itself — it’s worth reviewing.

In February, responding to President Obama’s SOTU pledge to overturn DADT in 2010, Gates and Mullen go further than any Pentagon leadership ever has in backing DADT repeal. Mullen, knowing the importance of having Colin Powell’s CJCS successor and the nation’s seniormost military officer lead the charge, makes the moral case for repeal. Gates, in his nose-meets-grindstone way, says it’s not a matter of “if” but “when” repeal will happen, and so he lays out a framework for proceeding. Their big concern is ensuring that the military does not feel that this is a huge cultural change being forced upon it in a time of war, something that can cause needless acrimony and backlash. So their proposal is to expressly solicit opinion from around the services, up and down the officer corps and the enlisted personnel, across the combatant commands, in the form of a working group led by Army Gen. Carter Ham and Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson, to guide how repeal will proceed. They set the report’s delivery date for December.

But if it’s December, then it’s hard to see how the Pentagon can meet Obama’s end-of-the-year deadline for getting rid of DADT. And remember: that deadline only came because the LGBT community demanded Obama keep a campaign promise. One of the most consistently loyal Democratic constituencies and the most disgustingly vilified American communities stood up for itself and demanded a president it helped elect do more than issue an ethereal pledge about how he’d like to stand up for civil rights but now just wasn’t the time and check back next week. So anti-DADT members of Congress expressed dissatisfaction with the timetable, and suggested that they would just move forward legislatively.

While that got hashed out, Gates took additional steps. He unilaterally ordered a relaxation of DADT enforcement. Of all the service chiefs, only the (outgoing) Marine commandant, Gen. James Conway, opposed repealing DADT. Some important military leaders, though, equivocated. So people could be forgiven for wondering how committed the leadership was to following through on what Obama, Gates and Mullen set forth. And so the LGBT community pushed harder, with Lt. Dan Choi — who will be remembered by history as a civil rights hero as much as a military one — getting arrested in acts of civil disobedience at the White House gates. But Gates and Mullen told Congress last month that they didn’t want any legislative efforts — like in the upcoming defense authorization — upstaging or preceding the Ham/Johnson working group.

That all fell apart after legislators, pushed by their LGBT community allies, were simply unsatisfied with the order of operations proposed by Gates and Mullen. Then retired officers like Gen. John Shalikahvili publicly floated a workable compromise: repeal the legislation now, but leave the implementation to whatever Ham and Johnson report. Everyone can plausibly claim a victory there. Suddenly the administration was faced with the prospect of opposing a reasonable compromise that would be imposed on it by the legislature — in other words, with becoming an obstacle to the very solution it pledged to seek. And that is why yesterday’s breakthrough happened.

It’s sausage-making, to be sure. But it’s also easy to forget that what was at stake was a timetable for getting to a mutually-agreed-upon goal. Gates and Mullen deserve credit for trying to balance the equities at stake here, although if I was gay, I don’t know if I’d be so eager to give them that credit — and if I were a gay serviceman or that person’s spouse, I definitely don’t know if I would. The LGBT community certainly deserves the lion’s share of the credit. Without its consistent activism here, this simply never would have happened. Lots of credit also belongs to the straight servicemen and women who told their chain of command that overturning DADT was overdue.

Of course, it’s always easier to apportion credit and blame when, like me, you don’t have any skin in the game. But this strikes me as a situation where people needed help reading from the same playbook or showing up to practice on time — differences of degree, in other words.

Here’s that Lieberman text.