Thunderous applause as President Clinton walks on stage and shakes hands with Jon Stewart.

Jon Stewart: Take a seat.

President Clinton: Thank you.

Jon Stewart: Let me ask you, so give any good speeches lately (laughter)? How did that feel at the convention? Could you tell that you were crushing it as you were doing it? Could ya; did you feel that?

President Clinton: Yes and no, but I, you know, what I mean by that is I worked so hard on that, for weeks and weeks and weeks. And then the White House designated Bruce Reed, who works for Vice President Biden now, and worked with me for me eight years, and worked with Erskine Bowles on that budget project; to help me. And then Gene Sperling the National Economic Advisor, who also was with me for eight years, came in and we worked the last day and a half after doing all this other work. And I was just determined to get the facts right; and to simplify the argument, without being simplistic. I didn't want to talk down to people. I wanted to explain what I thought was going on.

Jon Stewart: That's what was so stunning, I think. That's why it was such a bracing speech. The phrase you mentioned earlier about getting the facts right. (laughter) The idea that you would use (thunderous applause and laughter) you would use in your argument; I know, this is interesting; that you thought that you would utilize in your argument ... facts (laughter). And they would have; you would attach numbers to them that were real (laughter). I thought it was a bold choice on your part.

President Clinton: Well, you know, we were talking before the show started. I would think; just forget about politics. Just think about any time in your life you've been confused or angry or frightened or resentful or any thing and you didn't know what was going on. In those moments, explanation is way more important than eloquence. And rhetoric falls on deaf ears, so the only chance I had to get anybody to really listen was to say, look here's what I think happened ... boom, boom, boom, boom. And one of my favorite responses came from a guy who said I'm a conservative Republican, and I never voted for Clinton, I never even thought he was eloquent, but he treated me like a grown-up and I appreciated that. I feel like we can sit down and have a conversation now. It's people need to be told. The American people are plenty smart enough to figure this out. But, you know, I have a wife with a traveling job, so I'm home alone a lot (laughter).

Jon Stewart: What does she do? What kind of work is she in? That's interesting (laughter).

President Clinton: It just depends on what day it is.

Jon Stewart: (giggles)

President Clinton: But seriously, and I was president, and I was a governor for 12 years, and I've grappled with all kinds of economic challenges, and I have the time now to spend an hour or two a day to try and work this out, and yeah, you can get all kinds of information off the Internet, but you can't be sure if it's right or not, and there's all these disparate facts out there. So what I tried to do is to organize the information in a way I thought would be most helpful to people, and make the arguments that I believe that persuade me that the course that the President is taking is better than the one advocated by Governor Romney. I just tried to do it in a calm way without calling anybody any names, or getting anybody mad. I thought they'd been a little rough on him about that welfare and Medicare riff they're on so I had a little fun with that but otherwise ... (laughter).

Jon Stewart: But that's what was so … were you surprised because people took to it in a manner as though you had brought high rhetoric from the mountain. It was in its simplicity, I think that is what; it's almost as though you brought something to people and they were eating and they were like, oh my God, this is unreal, I've never had. And you're like, It's pizza. (laughter). Like it was ...

President Clinton: Well ...

Jon Stewart: The simplicity of it. The ability to bring it in that manner, I think is what people found refreshing about it.

President Clinton: First, I think the American people take this election seriously. They know they have to make choices that will affect their lives. And it's not very helpful if you take up there time and you don't explain what those choices are; at least from your point of view. So that's what I tried to do.

Jon Stewart: Are you surprised, though? It has struck me that the Romney campaign has been very clear that they don't want to give the specifics of that choice. They've been given a chance time and time again. Well, what loopholes would you close? Well, I'm going to work that out after I'm elected ...

President Clinton: See me about that afterwards.

Jon Stewart: ... with Congress. Right, see me about it after the election. Surprising a guy of that kind of business experience that you're dealing in, numbers and you would think specifics.

President Clinton: Well, part of the problem that he has is that ..

Jon Stewart: Part of? (laughter)

President Clinton: Yeah, is that he made all these commitments in the primary campaign.

Jon Stewart: Sure.

President Clinton: And you remember, and they just kept pushing everybody to the right. And so it seemed like every other week there was a new challenger coming up and he was playing Whac-a-mole. He had to knock them down. You know. And ...

Jon Stewart: Right. It's very kind of you to even Mole I think is actually ... (laughter)

President Clinton: But, in the course of that he wound up with a lot of commitments, and so, I mean, just think about it. This debt is a terrible problem. He said that. You know they ran that little debt clock up. Well, it will be a problem when interest rates go up if we don't, as I said, if we don't deal with it, it will deal with us, and we won't like it. None of us without regard to party. But if I come to you and I say we have this terrible national debt and here's my opening gambit. First thing I want to do is increase it by $5 trillion over a decade by doing another round of tax cuts that mostly benefit the people we benefited in the last decade, even thought it didn't produce jobs. Now we're in a really deep hole, much bigger than this clock I just showed you. Now let me tell you how we're going to get out of it. Well, what about the details? See me about that after the election.

Jon Stewart: Right.

President Clinton: So I wanted to try to explain that in very simple terms. No one else would do that; no one. Unless you were being driven by ideology instead of by evidence. This is a practical country. We have ideals. We have philosophies. But the problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence. So you have to mold the evidence to get the answer that you've already decided you've got to have. It doesn't work that way. Building an economy; rebuilding an economy is hard, practical nuts and bolts work.

(This is where the first half of the interview about the election was cut during the broadcast. From this point on is what was shown on the web only.)

President Clinton: You have to look at what the competition is doing. You have to look at what the factors resisting growth are. You have to look at the strengths of the country. I tried to talk about that. This country has enormous assets that most of our competitors in the future don't have. We are younger than Europe; we are younger than Japan. And we will be younger than China in 20 years, if we keep ...

Jon Stewart: Is that true?

President Clinton: Absolutely because of their one child policy and because they don't take a lot of immigrants. So if we keep opening the door for young immigrants who want to come here and get an education and work and do things, we're going to be okay. We've got a retirement problem with Social Security and with Medicare.

Jon Stewart: Right.

President Clinton: Because the baby-boomer generation is bigger than our children. But if we get; once you get all of us out of the way (laughter), the population balance is restored and we'll have a much more normal distribution of age and we'll be booming. It's going to be fine.

Jon Stewart: But you continue to make the argument though that we have to do things. That I think has been the whole thing (laughter) that I've been stunned about the Republicans is, you're saying, what we have to do is; there's a plan and we must make a thing, and their whole, seems to be their plan is get government out of the way, and the growth fairies come in (laughter) and they take care of everything and poor people will be magically fed and the market fairy will put something under your pillow and all will be right with the world.

President Clinton: Look, here's the problem with their argument. First of all, the free market is a great economic system. It's moved more people out of poverty in the world in the last 25 years than any 25 year period in history. It's great. All markets, as wel saw; you can go all the way back to the tulip bubble in Holland in the 1600s

Jon Stewart: Don't think I don't.

President Clinton: They all tend to self-destruct. So after the depression, we figured out at least how to stop that. And in the last four months of President Bush's term, and the first four or five months of President Obama's term, everybody was all hands on deck and they did a lot of things, including the unpopular TARP bill to keep us from falling into a depression. By the way, you have gotten the TARP money back plus a profit. Taxpayers have actually been repaid plus a profit. And then, the question is, all this damage has been done to the economy. You got all these hard working people, millions of them, at one time more than 15 million, who never missed a mortgage payment, didn't take out a bogus mortgage, and their house is still worth less than their mortgage. What are they going to do? How are you going to do this? You have all these financial institutions that are wondering if they should start loaning money again. And where's the money? How do you get it back into investment? How do you create jobs?

Jon Stewart: And government is the only power that can fill that vacuum to some extent.

President Clinton: And that's why the ... when things are normal, you can have this anti-government rant and it has no practical, or the practical consequences are not as great.

Jon Stewart: Right.

President Clinton: You know, one party cuts taxes more and spends less on education. It's, you know, you can argue who's right. When people are flat on their back, and there's zero inflation and zero interest rates. We can borrow money right now for less than the rate of inflation. You can actually borrow; the U.S. Government could borrow a trillion dollars for a year at a quarter of one percent interest because people trust us. They think our economy's strong and they will pay us almost to keep their money. When interest rates start up again, it's a different story. You've got to have that debt coming down. But here's the point I want to make. There's no example on our planet of a successful country if you define successful as high per capita income, low unemployment, rising incomes, and good social mobility. That means if you work hard and you do better, you've got a chance to get a raise. And you got a chance to do better than your parents did. Every country's that doing that has a strong private sector, and a strong government and they work together to grow the economy and create opportunity; each doing what they do best. There is no example of this picture that is being painted on the other side of the aisle. And Republicans didn't use to paint that picture. I mean, you know ...

Jon Stewart: Nixon would be considered a communist today.

President Clinton: Yeah, he would.

Jon Stewart: It used to be, it wasn't about freedom vs. socialism. But we've got to go commercial.

President Clinton: Dangerous lefty.

Jon Stewart: When we come back, we're going to talk about the Clinton Global Initiative.

President Clinton: Good.

Jon Stewart: We're going to see what's going on with that.