The other night on Special Report with Brit Hume, Mort Kondracke ripped the press for soft-balling Obama Wednesday in Chicago:

KONDRACKE: That press conference today in Chicago was a joke. There were no hard questions--

HUME: To Obama.

KONDRACKE: To Obama--no substantively hard questions at all. So as far as the media is concerned, I don't see the scrutiny coming.

Now, I don't consider myself a "reporter" per se, but given that I attended Wednesday's press conference and was called on by Obama to ask a question, I find myself in the curious position of defending the media.

Yes, Obama did get some questions that might be considered "easy" - in so much as they dealt with the back-and-forth of the campaign as opposed to hard core policy issues. For example, Obama was asked what he was going to do to help retire Hillary's debt, whether he was disappointed by Bill Clinton's tepid endorsement, what he's looking for in a Vice President, and what he thought about recent comments by Ralph Nader and McCain aide Charlie Black. Given that those are all topics that pundits (including the estimable Kondracke himself) have been "chattering" about, it's hard to knock the press for asking those questions, even if the public good might have been better served with questions focused on Iraq or trade instead.

But Obama did get asked a question about energy policy, two questions about his decision to opt out of public financing, a question about the Supreme Court decision on the death penalty for child rapists, a question on the impending Heller decision (which he sidestepped by saying he would wait until the Court issued the decision before commenting), and a question about changing his position on FISA.

There were also, as you might expect, a few questions dealing with local issues like the price of gas and the wave of violence currently gripping Chicago, particularly in the African-American community.

Could there have been more policy related questions and could they have been phrased more aggressively? Yes. But I wouldn't call Wednesday's presser "a joke," nor would I argue the press totally abdicated its responsibility.

For the record, the question I asked Obama was this: "Senator, back to your decision on public financing. It was widely criticized as being a flip-flop and/or broken promise. Do you accept this characterization as fair, and are you concerned that the decision might jeopardize your credibility on other pledges you've made during the campaign on issues like trade, health care and withdrawing troops from Iraq?"

Not the best question in the world, admittedly, but not what I would consider a soft ball either.

Michael Isikoff of Newsweek asked a question on FISA that was even more strongly worded, I thought, hitting Obama on a contradiction over his support of the current FISA compromise with a speech Obama gave in January where he vowed to support a filibuster over the issue of retroactive immunity for telecoms. Again, a fair question that attempted to get Obama to explain/clarify/confront a specific decision on a specific (and important) issue.

Let me digress for one final observation that circles back to the valid part of Kondracke's criticism. The idea that the junior Senator from Illinois is a teleprompter-dependent gaffe machine, which has been floated by more than a few Obama critics, is a canard. That is not to say Obama doesn't make mistakes or fall off message on occasion, but in a press conference setting without notes or a prompter, it's obvious that he has a good and wide ranging grasp of subject matter, is nimble on his feet, and, perhaps most importantly for a politician, is very effective at appearing to answer a question without actually (or fully) answering the question.

Because of this, the press will have to up its game and be thoughtful and diligent in its questioning of Obama if they hope to pin him down on issues or get things out of him in the future.