On his show Thursday night, Daily Show host Jon Stewart interviewed former President Bill Clinton, praising him for using actual facts in his speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Clinton explained that he didn’t want to talk down to the American people. He accused Republicans of basing their economic plan purely on ideology instead of evidence.

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“If we don’t deal with it, it will deal with us,” Clinton said, referring to the national debt. “If I come to you and I say, ‘we have this terrible national debt and here is my opening gambit, first thing I’m going to do is increase it by $5 trillion over a decade by doing another round of tax cuts that mostly benefited the people that we benefited in the last decade, even though it didn’t produce jobs. Now we are in a really deep hole, now let me tell you how we are going to get out of it — well what about the details? See me after the election.'”

“So I wanted to try to explain that in simple terms. No one would do that unless you were being driven by ideology.”

Watch the full interview, via The Daily Show:

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