clinton dee dee myers.ne cooper. and former white house press secretary for president clinton dee dee myers. >>> from nbc news in washington, it's "meet the press" with david gregory. >>> the latest nbc news/"wall street journal" poll for where this race stands, chuck todd has the numbers. this is significant. >> this is among likely voters, david. 47%, 47%. not all tied races are equal. the president sitting at 47% if this were the sunday before election day there would be a lot of concerns in chicago. they want to be at 48% or 49%. sitting at 47% is good for a challenger, not a good number for an incumbent. let's go inside the numbers a little bit. the gender gap. you brought it up. among men, romney, a 10-point lead. let's go to women. this is interesting. president, an eight-point lead here, this is his smallest lead among women that we've had all year long. a few other things inside the numbers here, david. in the midwest, romney a narrow lead, but way inside the margin of error. and among all of the collective battleground states a little bit of a lead for mitt romney. speaking of the battleground, i want to go there

and former white house secretary for president clinton dee dee myers. welcome to all of you.et's talk libya, tom friedman. what are we to make of this? could this be politicized any further? >> it's totally politicized at this point. other than a civil war in beirut for 40 years, these are incredibly messy situations. people don't show up in uniforms. you can have a flash mob turned into a plan thing. you can have plan people inside of a flash mob. to me, this is utterly contrived story in the sense that this is the end of, you know, obama's foreign policy. i think we are missing two things. one is the global picture. what's going on in the arab world since the arab spring? we've seen the breakdown of the intelligence service state. all of these states have collared all of these islamists and jihadists for us, in many cases. those states have broken down, but a new order hasn't arisen. and that's what you saw in benghazi. but here's what's also new, and we have completely missed this story, and it's a great thing for america. let's forget which candidate it might serve. what

joining me is former clinton press secretary, dee dee myers and republican strategist, john bravender me start with you. presumably all republicans are feeling a surge of great excitement following the debate. how much has that been dissipated by what are undeniably very good jobs figures today? >> first of all, i guess i would argue that they are as good as either you're saying or particularly that obama is saying. if you look at the adjusted numbers for july and august, actually the new numbers aren't any better than that. if you look, the only reason that unemployment is going down is they're taking more and more people who have basically given up or are underemployed out of the equation and so what has happened is we're now starting to accept and get excitement over mediocrity. but i will say this. the good news for the president is we're discussing the job numbers today and whether they're good, bad or whatever rather than his debate performance. i think that's actually good for obama. >> there are too many middle class families that are still struggling to pay the bills. they we

dee dee myers served as press secretary to bill clinton and steve mcmahon is democratic strategist. dee dee, you've been through some bumps on the road and gotten through them with the help of your boss, president clinton, and you've been through local politics in san francisco. where are we now, a bump in the road or a real ditch the campaign's in looking at these numbers? >> it's a bump in the road. the fundamentals of this race haven't changed. the electoral college map, it's a fact it's a harder road for mitt romney than barack obama. as long as obama is still leading like ohio, as he is, the road gets narrow for romney. the president had a bad night last week. we democrats made it worse by everyone running around with their hair or fire for a week saying how horrible it was. in the aftermath, the republicans knew they had a good night but they weren't as confident in victory after they looked at us for a while. we need to settle back, get back to blocking and tackling. president needs to have a better performance in the next two debates than the first one. this race is still fundam