Having long ago let my subscription to The New Yorker lapse, I went in search last week of the now infamous issue with a cover drawing of Barack Obama dressed in Muslim garb and his wife, decked out as a black militant, bumping fists in the Oval Office while an American flag burns in the fireplace under a portrait of Osama bin Laden.

The howls of Obama supporters and the delights of Republicans began immediately. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, defended the cover as satire, but it made me wonder if long-time New Yorker editor William Shawn would've run it. I doubt it. The big problem with The New Yorker, like most other media outlets, is that it has to swim in a degraded cultural sea. American culture has been reduced to its lowest common denominator, and cutting-edge celebrants of culture, such as The New Yorker, have had to lower their standards to seriously discuss topics that Shawn would've rejected as too coarse. Shawn used to wince at four-letter words that film critic Pauline Kael would slip into her reviews.

Still, the mission of The New Yorker is the same: To appeal to the New York liberal intelligentsia who probably looked at the Obama cover and, like Shawn would have done, winced.

Columnists and letter writers began weighing in, mostly defending the cover as free speech and for those who took offense to just get over it.

Columnist Kathleen Parker wrote that it was elitist to think Americans wouldn't "get" the cover. Are Americans so literally stupid that they can't understand satire, Parker wondered. Well, yes they are.

One conservative said the cover would soon be all over the Internet as a right-wing recruiting tool. The image also will be on T-shirts, no doubt with a Confederate flag on the flip side.

If you can't accept the satire, you're an elitist, was the conventional wisdom of the cover. Actually, it's the pundits in the media who miss the point. For the American people, perception always trumps reality, and an emotional response is always trusted more than the intellect. The message on the cover will play well to their fears and prejudices.

It's interesting too that most opinion was directed at liberal whiners instead of the conservative stooges the cover lampoons. In other words, the satirical aspect of the cartoon wasn't as important as turning the image back on elitist liberals.

Let's put the shoe on the other foot, where it never fits. Early in the George W. Bush years, The Nation ran a cover of Bush looking like Howdy Doody. OK, that's The Nation, America's leading liberal weekly. But what if that cover had run on The New Yorker? Or what if Time, leading up to the 2004 election, had run a cover of Bush with a hole in his head where a brain belongs? Detractors of Bush would've said the media finally get it. Supporters of Bush would decry the legitimacy of the perceptions of Bush's critics. Same thing now. Here's the difference: Bush was never lampooned, and no media outlet would've attempted it.

In the 1980s, Garry Trudeau, in his Doonesbury comic strip, took us on a tour of Ronald Reagan's brain where, of course, there wasn't much to see. Conservatives foamed at the mouth and many newspapers pulled the strip. But as USA Today wrote after the Obama cover, it's just a cartoon. True, but it has more to do with who's being satirized.

USA Today points out that John McCain has been the butt of age jokes so why worry with the Obama cartoon? But an old white man is not going to reinforce fear and bias like Muslims and black militants. Even though it's just satire, perception beats reality in the anti-intellectual American culture. McCain, for the record, did denounce the Obama cover.

A recent cartoon in a Gannett newspaper showed a POW sitting in his cell and thinking his situation doesn't qualify him for the presidency. A letter writer said it was too bad the cartoonist didn't become a POW. That's a visceral reaction to satire and mild by conservative standards. Conservatives tend to get more outraged about satire and slights because they know their ideology can't be defended intellectually.

We do live in a country where The New Yorker can publish any cover it likes, and we can all talk about it. It would be nice to see such lampoons directed across the political spectrum, but I don't look for that to happen. The right can't take it, and the mainstream media still quake when the right roars.

Ultimately, we'll have to answer the question of what the cartoon added to the presidential campaign debate or detracted from it.

Time will tell.

Stephen Dick is the assistant managing editor of The Herald Bulletin in Anderson, Ind.