Fair question.

An anonymous staffer, via Greg Sargent, via mcjoan...

According to our Hill staffer, some liberals are beginning to fear that it will ultimately be the latter. And this has produced a kind of gloom among some libs in the House right now who are persuaded that the Dem leadership will ultimately back down in hopes that other future legislative routes will prove more fertile.

"If this is what they go with, it begs the question, Why did we go through this whole exercise with the first supplemental and everything else?" our staffer asks. "What did we really accomplish?"

What? Well, quite a bit, really. As that Kerry fella put it after the Reid-Feingold vote...

Last year, Senator Feingold and I stood with 11 Senators for a firm one year deadline to force the Iraqis to find a political solution and redeploy our troops. The number of Democratic and Republican Senators who agree that we must have benchmarks and timelines, continues to grow.

The Senate's moved from 11 to 29. Not enough, to be sure, but more, in this case, is better if insufficient. Every time we can put their votes under the spotlight of public scrutiny, we win. As John Arivosis puts it...

Every Iraq vote, even though we keep losing, chips away at Republican congressional support for the war. And what's more, it also has been chipping away at Democratic support for the war. Every time we vote, the numbers for our side increase.

The numbers for our side increased. We accomplished that. It's not everything, but it's something.

Remember, too, what we saw unfold during that Reid-Feingold vote. Every Democratic Senator seeking the Presidential nomination felt, for whatever reason, compelled to support the cloture motion, even those (Hillary, admittedly, Biden and Obama, probably) who weren't particularly committed to the underlying legislation. The contrast, then, between our team and their Republican rivals has been brought into sharper focus. Since the overwhelming majority of the public is on our side, it's important that our candidates demonstrate that they are on the public's side.

We accomplished that, too.

If you really thought that slim Democratic majorities would be able to end the war and stuff before Memorial Day, well, sorry. It's going to be harder than that, and take longer. More Democrats would help, but you end a war, as it were, with the majority you have. With a slight one, it's a long, hard row to hoe.

A row made up of one accomplishment after another before the harvest.

Inch by inch, row by row.

Without apology.