Interview: Candidates need to stop circus, get down to issues: Missouri governor

The two U.S. presidential candidates need to get down to the issues, rather than just focus on scandals and theatrics as they have done so far, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon told Xinhua in an interview on Sunday.

The "continuing distractions and circus that we've seen" should stop, and "hopefully they'll get down to business and talk about the issues," Nixon said.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton faced off Sunday night in their second debate held at the Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

The debate took the form of a town hall meeting, in which both candidates answered questions from the audience.

The governor, a Democrat, made the comments just after lewd sexist comments made by Trump were released. The tapes, from a Trump's interview several years back with radio shock jock Howard Stern, as well as off-camera moments made by Trump over a decade ago on the set of the TV show Access Hollywood, have caused shockwaves in the U.S. media and outrage among Trump's critics.

In the tapes, Trump bragged that being famous allowed him to "kiss any woman" and he even mentioned grabbing women's genitals.

The backlash has been so severe that high-ranking Republicans are backing away from the brash billionaire. Trump has issued a defiant apology while even his wife Melania blasted the comments as "unacceptable and offensive."

That was just the latest in a seemingly never-ending jab-for-jab squabbling between the two candidates, with what critics call a reluctance to discuss actual issues.

When asked by Xinhua what the major issues are, Nixon named education, economy and global leadership.

"We need to continue to improve education here. We need to make sure we've got pre-school and affordable college. We need to help this economy transform to the world economy that it is, and that means both in investment as well as mechanization as well as trade," Nixon said.

"And we have to understand the complex nature of the world as it exists right now. We've got to be world players," he said.

As a Democrat, Nixon believed that Clinton has policies on those issues and laid them out clearly.

"(Clinton has policies for) an expanding economy for America, more pre-school, more affordable college, and America playing a leading role in peace and prosperity in the world," the governor added. Endi