I agree with Joanna, Brad, Ulla, Alina and others in that you are being too hard on yourself, and there is no reason whatsoever that you shouldn’t have shared this with us.

As noted by some of the above commenters, you stated your intentions clearly from the beginning.

Although I do not typically follow speeches of a political nature, there are certainly some good ones out there and I don’t see any reason why marketers should indeed look at some of the more effective speeches in order to derive some valuable lessons about communication.

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Thinking about it, I think it’s evident that like with Alina, there were no good speeches here either – well, we are neighbours, have the same curse I guess )

I also find it interesting that we always think that the giver of the speech is who counts, his actions will determine anything and so on and not the listener.
But just for a moment, please, stop and think.

Let’s imagine that one person stands out in the spotlight and states:
“We are living in dark times. Doom is coming our way, our very existence is in danger. Thank you for listening” and then leaves the stage.

Does it matter what he said? Well, in a sense yes, but not really. What matters is what the listeners heard, and what conclusions they draw, what decisions they make.

The above lines can prompt people to roll on their back whining and crying “oh wailey, wailey, there will be reckoning, we gonna die, dree our weird, oh wailey wailey!!”. Doom comes, people get squashed, everyone dies. Not too productive, is it?

On the other hand it can prompt people to roll up their sleeves and say “oh yeah? let it come, we gonna kick the scuggan, no doom will make us give up” and then get to work and pull through the whole doom thing, as the poet wrote it over 150 years ago “fewer in numbers but never broken, the nation lives in our homeland”.
[Forgive me for the 'wailey wailey' and the 'scuggan', read too many Pratchett and the Wee Free man are funny ]

The difference? The first bunch of people concentrated on the word doom, decided that the message of the speech is that there is no escape and acted accordingly.
The second group heard that there are tough times coming, and decided that the message of the speech is that they should prepare for a long and hard fight against heavy odds and acted like that.

In the communication course we learned when two people speak, there are actually 6 of them

The True Joe, Joe as he thinks of himself, and Joe as perceived by Julie. And of course the same for Julie.

Now imagine that someone gives a rousing speech to 100,000 people. There is the actual words spoken, with the real meaning, the meaning the speaker thinks he conveys, and then 100,000 meanings as the speech is interpreted by the audience, each meaning distorted by three filters:
the true listener, the listener as he thinks of himself, and the way the listener perceives the speaker.

People always bring up Martin L. King as an example. But lets not forget his speech is so inspiring and all because we see King as a hero, and we agree with him and our filters does not distort much on his speech.
Now if you play the same speech to a white-supremacist in 1914 I bet the speech would get a different rating for obvious reasons.

As for the actual speech given by Obama.

I doubt that anyone can seriously believe that the President of the US will and should solve the problem. I seriously doubt that out of 305,880,000 (that’s almost 306 million) people living in the US it is the President who will and should do the actual work.
No, he will give speeches, will smile in the camera, will encourage and cheer on, but the work will be done by the people. And the work the people will do will be based on how they interpret the situation, what they hear in the speeches and what they want to achieve.