A poster on another board made a good observation about the internet and that a deliberate negative message about a character serves to revive and solidify the iconic status of the given character in the mind of people who might not have read this character for a long time.
Wanted to throw something else in here, and again this is with the caveat that I'm speaking in my (relatively recent) role as a non-collecting, non-reading member of the unwashed rabble.
It's worth noting that every "Superman renounces his citizenship" link I found took me to the same blog, and that blog wasn't necessarily judging the move one way or the other; it just focused on it to the exclusion of the rest of the issue's contents. Possibly this is a result of the "Drudge Factor," that tendency of certain link-collecting sites to seek out potentially controversial headlines and play them up, even if the link back reveals the original article wasn't so controversial at all.
In this sense, there's a certain amount of rabble-rousing involved, and it's interesting to review the factors that make that possible; the most obvious is the highly polarized nature of American politics today, but the other is that Americans can be counted on to have an understanding of, an affinity for, indeed even a sense of ownership about, superheroes, and especially Superman. People who haven't read a comic book since childhood -- if ever -- nonetheless have an idea of what he's supposed to stand for, and if you assault that, they get their backs up. Again, they don't read comics and wouldn't whether the character was done to fit their conception of him or not, but tamper with him and they'll raise a fuss.
I'm not so sure that the push back from the internet is such a bad thing for Superman. I seriously doubt that people are going to boycott comics in high numbers.
Nobody who reads Superman regularly could possibly be more offended by it than they were when he killed three helpless prisoners, grew a Fabio mullet or turned into a poor man's Lightning Lad. From what you say, if they read the book, they took the scene in context and found it inoffensive, unless they were died-in-the-wool Conservative super-patriots, in which case it's hard to believe they've found anything nourishing in Superman comics for decades.
Non-comics readers are already "boycotting" comics in high numbers just through indifference. You can't boycott something you never buy, anyway.
As for the rest, those who do buy comics but consider Superman a goody two-shoes, flag-waving boy scout, the controversy may actually help sell books to them. But then again, maybe not, since I doubt the "flag-waving" part offends them as much as the "goody two-shoes." I don't imagine Superman-haters avoid him for the politics so much as the lack of kewl disembowelments and decapitations.
Anyway, I haven't really seen a "push back from the internet" (though I haven't spent much time following the story, anyway, so many I missed it). My take on it is that it went like this:
BLOGGER: "Hey, waitaminnit, did Superman just give up his citizenship?"
DRUDGE: "SUPERMAN RENOUNCES AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP!"
HANDFUL OF DRUDGE FOLLOWERS: "Traitor leftie! It's Obama's fault!"
REST OF WORLD: "Who cares? SuperWHO?"
FIVE MINUTES LATER: "Bin Laden's dead!"
Then ten minutes of cheering followed by demands for proof and roll-out of first draft of conspiracy theories.
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