"The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree," said Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman.

Methinks Burton doth protest too much.

After all, this latest campaign kerfuffle was the perfect distraction to mask what's behind the controversial caricature.

Inside the New Yorker is a 14,619-word story by Ryan Lizza that has largely escaped attention. It's not a flattering portrayal of the senator, who comes off as opportunistic. But few know this, so caught up in the cover controversy that they haven't taken the time to read the article itself.

And so, the cover controversy benefits the Obama campaign in two ways, first by casting derision on the Web rumor mongers, and second by pulling attention to the front of the magazine, and so away from the unflattering article.

Consider that the same day the New Yorker was published, Newsweek magazine released its latest poll showing the presidential race to be a dead heat. Beyond that headline was some troubling data: Twelve percent believe Obama was sworn in as a U.S. senator on a Koran; twenty-six percent believe he was raised a Muslim; and thirty-nine percent believe he attended a radical Muslim madrassa as a child in Indonesia. Each of these false beliefs is nevertheless circulated via rogue e-mails and supported by trash Web sites.

The New Yorker blowback went a long way to dispelling those myths. The cover appeared on countless network newscasts, cable TV shows, and in newspapers across the country. In every instance it was introduced with an explanation of how it portrayed the Obamas according to urban legend.

In other words, each report on the cover was itself an attempt to set the record straight. The net effect was to benefit the campaign.

Clearly the cover was satire. Barack Obama wears a turban; Michelle Obama is complete with '70s-style Afro and AK-47; on the wall is a portrait of Osama bin Laden; an American flag crackles in the fireplace. It was so MAD-Magazine-over-the-top that it rightly directed ridicule at the lunacy of what some knuckleheads pass along when they hit the SEND key.

Without the cover and the coverage, the media cycle would have done little to dissuade the 12 percent the Newsweek poll identified as believing Obama to be Muslim. As it was, that cover ended up deriding such beliefs in a way nothing else could have. Nobody who saw that cover would take it as literal truth, and most New Yorker readers are probably supporting Obama anyway.

Then there is the added benefit: Lost in the shuffle was an in-depth profile of Obama in Chicago between 1991 and 2004, when he ran for the U.S. Senate, a period, as writer Ryan Lizza points out, that was a "lacuna" in his autobiography. It's a portrait not in keeping with Obama's carefully cultivated campaign image.

The Barack Obama who was elected to the Illinois state senate, ran for a U.S. House seat unsuccessfully, and ultimately won a seat in the U.S. Senate was willing to get his hands dirty in the street politics of Chicago and mold his views to suit his ever-changing career milestones. When Obama decided to run for state senate in 1995, he turned to Toni Preckwinkle, who was then his alderman. Preckwinkle supported Obama in that bid, again in his failed U.S. House bid, and in his race for the U.S. Senate. Preckwinkle is now "disenchanted" with Obama, according to the article: "In retrospect, I think he saw the positions he held as stepping-stones to other things and therefore approached his public life differently than other people might have."

There are other details the Obama campaign will not be anxious to see re-aired. Like the campaign event hosted by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, former leaders of the Weathermen, the group that once bombed the Pentagon. Or that Obama attended the Rev. Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March in 1995. Maybe the image of him getting his opponents for state senate knocked off the ballot - or his dining and vacationing with now-convicted developer Tony Rezko - will come as a surprise to those who see him as different from most politicians.

Maybe his comments in the Hyde Park Herald eight days after 9/11, wherein he recommended engaging in the difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness, will become a newfound liability: "The essence of this tragedy . . . most often . . . grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair." Such a reflection may not play so well in Middle America.

"Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of antiestablishment revolutionary," Lizza writes, in a profile far too few people will now read, having had attention diverted by a clever cover and the resulting furor.

It's a picture that shadowed 14,619 words.