This may have something to do with the fact that you can't reduce such a speech to sound bites. But even the snippets they showed didn't make Obama look good. There was no large, enthusiastic crowd. He looked defensive, and his delivery was only half alive. All in all, the speech read better than it sounded -- which is quite different for an Obama speech!
Maybe he'd have been better off publishing the thing as an Op-Ed in some friendly newspaper or journal?