Commonsense rule #1 for influence peddlers: Don’t flaunt it.

The poster child for what happens when you do is Michael Deaver, who posed in the back of a limo for this magazine’s cover in 1986. It didn’t have quite the effect he might have hoped:

“Who’s This Man Calling?” the headline asked, then answered: “Influence Peddling in Washington.” In case Deaver wasn’t recognized, his name was printed over his knee.

That was the moment when Deaver’s rags-to-riches life combusted. Popular opinion demanded a crackdown on Washington’s business-as-usual practices. The news media and a Democratic Congress obliged, targeting a close friend of the Republican president who was seen as cashing in on his access.

Within months, stories implying that Deaver used his Oval Office connections for monetary gain abounded. One said that he had lobbied the director of the Office of Management and Budget on behalf of Rockwell International over the B-1 bomber; others alleged that he had signed a $105,000 contract to represent the Canadian government six days after leaving the White House. Columnist William Safire called Deaver “Reagan’s Billy Carter.”

That’s why I’m wondering what the fallout will be from today’s enormous Washington Post Style Section profile of Heather Podesta, whom the paper describes as “an It Girl in a new generation of young, highly connected, built-for-the-Obama-era lobbyists. She gets an undeniable boost from a famous name — she is the sister-in-law of John Podesta, the insider’s insider who was Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff and Obama’s transition director, and the wife of über-lobbyist Tony Podesta.”

The opening photo of the story shows Podesta posed next to a Shepard Fairey image of her husband done up to look like the iconic one of Obama that made Fairey famous during the 2008 campaign. And it gets worse: