It was one hell of a speech. However, I tend to be wary of exercises that focus on a speech by a particular political candidate and that ask students to divine the candidate's agenda and success in pushing it. These sometimes lend themselves to student interpretations that are colored by whatever preconceptions they have about the candidate (and that I have about the candidate, to be completely honest).

My impulse would be to shift the focus to different editorial writers' interpretations of the speech, so that we could see how Obama's rhetoric had different effects on different kinds of audiences, or was filtered through the expectations of people with distinct agendas. We'd look at the speech itself, too, but keep the focus on the way that the media-ocracy seized on this or that part of it to advance their own arguments. That's me, though.