Oddly, but sort of interestingly, Richard Cohen in the Washington Post compares Hillary Clinton to Marie Antoinette.

According to Cohen, “Just as Marie came to personify all that was wrong with the aristocracy, so Hillary has come to personify all that is wrong with Bill, the Democrats, liberals, working women, independent women and women of a certain kind….”

I’ll let you be the judge of that, and instead take this opportunity to make a point about image and identity in our modern world, and instead compare Hillary Clinton to Larry Summers.

Hillary Clinton has become a Rorschach test; one’s opinion of her is invariably dominated by the prejudices and attitudes one brings to her consideration. She means a hundred different things to a hundred different people.

Which is to say that she has lost control of her public identity; she has lost control of her message; and, in my opinion, public people who are not clearly and solidly identified with a particular and positive image have enormous difficulty leading.

This was one problem Larry Summers had: he represented something different to every possible constituency of the university and the world outside it. Economists, conservatives, Washingtonians, Jews, alumni, internationalists, practitioners of the liberal arts, just plain liberals—every one of them saw Larry Summers differently. There was no consistent, unified image that Summers himself had largely shaped. Whereas if you asked all those people about, say, Derek Bok, they’d probably all say pretty much the same thing.

I’m not quite sure why this happened, but I think it was fatal to Summers. When everyone is imposing their own interpretation of who you are on what you do, your attempts to lead become bogged down in debates over identity and intention. It’s an oddity: for a public man, Summers really is not well-known.