Friday forecast: First presidential debate wrap up

>>> well that reaction to the new jobs numbers and the first debate from white house senior adviser david plouffe in a few moments but first let me bring in my panel for the rest of the hour. jim gary , msnbc contributor and former dnc karen finney and the fix it man himself, chris cillizza , psychological barrier, below 8%. all the political scientists that talk about unemployment rates. they're all going to like hey i told you the 13 keys to this and seven keys to this. in all honestly 8% psychological barrier.

>> this is the thing is i've already gotten a million e-mails because i wrote something that said this is good news for obama when he needed good news. saying you have to look at the u 6. look, i understand all of those things. i am not saying i am an economist. you know who else is an economist? the average undecided voter . when they look at this they say, wow. it went down under 8%. is it great? no. if you ask president obama on the day he took office, hey, unemployment is going to be 7.8% the month before you have the secret election is that good, bad, or ugly? he would say that's ugly. but it's all context and perception. in my opinion if the trend line looks like it is moving downward obama can now say the trend line is moving downward. it at least allows him to make the argument things aren't perfect. i know that. not everything i did worked. but they're slowly but surely getting better. this helps that argument.

>> karen, interesting though about the impact. remember you have the democratic convention as good as it got. friday the jobs report comes out. and it's a bad jobs report.

>> that's right.

>> and it stopped the momentum not at all.

>> right.

>> but in fairness romney helped with that. he had his own gaffes.

>> here you have, you know, romney , everything is moving in the right direction. great debate. the president. the democrats. like hammering, you said they're stopping you as you're going. what is wrong with the president?

>> hey.

>> it is one of these things. i think the press will cover it differently. does the average voter -- does it change their mind about the economy?

>> the polls had already shown that people were feeling better about the economy in general so i think if anything this adds to that. i think the larger political issue is for romney . i've long felt that one debate performance alone was not going to be enough to be a game changer for him. it was more about they've got to have a good week after. this is going to blunt that a little bit.

>> let me read the romney statement before i get to you, jim . this is not what a real recovery looks like. this is just now from the romney campaign. recreated fewer jobs in september than august and fewer jobs in august than in july and we've lost over 600,000 manufacturing jobs since president obama took office. if not for all the people who have simply dropped out of the labor force the real unemployment rate would be closer to 11%. jim , we had correct on air in a graphic by the way about manufacturing, i had it wrong on another sheet of paper. manufacturing jobs went down last month two months in a row. what is interesting there, jim , is there was a standard press release line every republican had that now goes away which is president obama had promised unemployment would be below 8%. they had to delete that.

>> now we can adopt the line the obama administration used in 31 of the past 33 months. it's important to not read too much into one month's jobs report. in light of that we look at these numbers, some are part-time but how about the halloween costume stores? any time it goes down it's good news. the divergence between the household and the establishment a little weird.

>> right.

>> you know, one of those things you'll take good news anywhere you can get it. i would be a little anything that looks like spiking the football on this, excessively celebration. obama can't go out there and say upon my orders we hunted down and killed the 8% unemployment rate .

>> and republicans sanity seem seem -- can't seem to be too dour.