Significant political announcements should be made in a forum where the politician making them immediately takes unscripted, unvetted questions from an independent press corps. While I may be critical of members of the press at times, journalists are generally the only people given an opportunity to publicly question political figures contemporaneously with the announcements they make. So a press conference seem to me to be a reasonable venue for a politician who has an announcement to make. There are numerous advantages to taking questions on the spot. If you know you will have to answer questions right away, you think differently about what you are going to say and, possibly, what you are going to do. It would have been a good if our current President had more often had to answer, right away, questions from the press about any number of decisions he has made, decisions ranging from his choice of personnel (e.g., his running mate, his cabinet officers) to his decisions about world affairs and human rights (e.g. to invade Iraq, to support torture) to his picks about economic policy (e.g. to stick with allowing the subprime mortgage market to function as it did for many months after others raised red flags about it). If you know you will be asked about your choices as soon as you announce them and that the people asking will not necessarily be enthusiastic, you have to think through your reasons so you are ready to field those questions. This preparation gives you an opportunity to make sure you of your reasons for your decision, to double check that your decision will hold up to prompt scrutiny. A politician ready to answer questions immediately upon announcing her or his decision demonstrates that she or he thought through the decision. Such forethought can improve the quality of a choice. Demonstrating that you engage in such forethought gives others confidence in your deliberative abilities; it makes it clear that that you look before you leap.