Hillary Clinton is leaving the answers to all questions about the controversial “C.P. Time” skit she did with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to de Blasio himself, distancing herself a bit from the matter, the New York Times reports.
“Well, look, it was Mayor de Blasio’s skit,” Clinton told Cosmopolitan magazine when asked about the skit that has been slammed as racially insensitive. “He has addressed it, and I will really defer to him because it is something that he’s already talked about.”
De Blasio's office has said that he was only making fun of himself at the Inner Circle dinner roast Saturday when he joked that he had been late to endorse Clinton’s presidential candidacy because he was running on “C.P. Time,” or “Colored People’s Time.” The joke drew some uncomfortable chuckles from the crowd. At that point, Clinton jumped in to clarify the phrase as meaning “Cautious Politician Time.”
“It was clearly a staged show. It was a scripted show. The whole idea was to do the counterintuitive by saying ‘cautious politician time.’ Every actor thought it was a joke on a different convention. That was the whole idea. I think people are missing the point here,” de Blasio said on CNN on Monday.
His office later released a statement adding, “In an evening of satire, the only person this was meant to mock was the mayor himself, period. Certainly no one intended to offend anyone,” Cosmopolitan notes.
Read more at the New York Times and Cosmopolitan.