The 2016 Blast The latest POLITICO scoops and coverage of the 2016 elections. Email Sign Up

Tweets from https://twitter.com/politico/lists/team-politico



Bill de Blasio said that he thought people were missing the point of the joke. | Getty Clinton blames de Blasio for racially charged joke

Hillary Clinton doesn’t want to talk about the racially charged joke she made with Bill de Blasio over the weekend — she’s referring questions to the New York City mayor.

At New York's annual Inner Circle dinner on Saturday night, Clinton made a surprise appearance along with Leslie Odom Jr., the African-American actor who plays Aaron Burr in the musical "Hamilton."

She thanked de Blasio for his endorsement but, in a nod to his months of claiming not to have made up his mind, said it took him “long enough.”

“Sorry, Hillary,” the mayor responded. "I was running on C.P. time.”

“That’s not — I don’t like jokes like that, Bill," Odom said.

“Cautious politician time. I’ve been there,” Clinton chimed in.

Outraged critics said that de Blasio, whose wife is African-American, was making a joke about "colored people's time" — the offensive notion that blacks are often late — and ripped Clinton for participating in it.

De Blasio, defending the joke on CNN, described it as "clearly a staged show."

"The whole idea," he said, "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."

His office also released a statement saying, "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."

In an interview with Cosmopolitan magazine published on Tuesday, Clinton was asked if the skit was "inappropriate," or whether critics were indeed "missing the point," as De Blasio had put it.

“Well, look, it was Mayor de Blasio's skit," she responded. "He has addressed it, and I will really defer to him because it is something that he's already talked about."