NEW YORK (AP) – A New York Post cartoon that appears to link President Barack Obama to a violent chimpanzee drew outrage Wednesday from civil rights leaders and elected officials who said it echoed racist stereotypes of blacks as monkeys.

The cartoon by Sean Delonas shows a dead chimp and two police officers, one with a smoking gun. The caption reads, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” The cartoon refers to Travis the chimp, who was shot to death by police in Connecticut on Monday after it mauled a friend of its owner.

Obama signed his administration’s economic stimulus plan on Tuesday.

The cartoon set off a furious response against the Post. The phones at the newspaper rang off the hook all day with angry callers. Protesters picketed the tabloid’s Manhattan offices, demanding an apology and a boycott and chanting “shut the Post down.” The Rev. Al Sharpton planned another round of protests Thursday, calling the cartoon “troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys.” The newspaper stood by the work.

“The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. said Col Allan, editor-in-chief of the Post. “It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist.”

Some critics said that the cartoon suggests that Obama should be assassinated while trivializing a tragedy in which a woman was disfigured and a chimpanzee killed. Others denounced what they called the Republican slant of the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid.

State Sen. Eric Adams called it a “throwback to the days” when black men were lynched.

“How could The Post let this cartoon pass as satire?” said Barbara Ciara, president of the National Association of Black Journalists. “To compare the nation’s first African-American commander in chief to a dead chimpanzee is nothing short of racist drivel.”

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs declined to comment on the cartoon Wednesday. “I have not seen the cartoon,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One as Obama returned to Washington from Arizona, where he announced his plan to deal with the foreclosure crisis. “But I don’t think it’s altogether newsworthy reading the New York Post.”

The cartoon drew hundreds of comments on the Internet and on the liberal Huffington Post Web site, where reporter Sam Stein wrote: “At its most benign, the cartoon suggests that the stimulus bill was so bad, monkeys may as well have written it. Most provocatively, it compares the president to a rabid chimp.”

It is not the first time that Delonas, the longtime cartoonist for the Post’s Page Six, has raised eyebrows with a heavy-handed caricature.

An earlier Delonas cartoon made fun of Paul McCartney’s ex-wife Heather Mills for having only one leg, and another compared gay people seeking marriage licenses to sheep lovers. In a cartoon from last month, an enormous Jessica Simpson dumps boyfriend Tony Romo for Ronald McDonald.