Friends of Hillary

Gail Collins

The American economy has gone through some tough times lately. But, happily, we still lead the world in the production of corn, soybeans, beef, cheese and stories about Hillary Clinton.

Clinton has become famous in a unique, remarkable way. She’s practically an organizing principle for the American consciousness. We see her everywhere. How could Barbara Walters have signed off from “The View” this week without a drop-in from H.R.C. — who holds the record for multiple appearances on Walters’ annual Most Fascinating People roundup? How could Gloria Steinem have celebrated her 80th birthday party without a video visit from the former first lady/senator/secretary of state? How could the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries have gotten through its Las Vegas convention without a Hillary speech?

O.K., they had to pay her for the last one. But while she was there, somebody threw a shoe at her. At once, the nation had something new to talk about. People were trudging through their days amid dreary domestic headlines about crime, bad weather and congressional gridlock. Then suddenly it was — Hillary! Shoe!

It’s so interesting how interested we are in her. Of course, she’s a potential presidential candidate. But she’s also got the critical national role of being someone Americans all have in common.

Ever since the industrial revolution, when Americans abandoned small-town life for anonymous cities, they’ve bonded by talking about celebrities. In 1800, people chatted over their back fence about the neighbors. In 1900, the guys on the assembly line no longer shared mutual friends, but they all knew that boxing champion John L. Sullivan was a terrible drunk, and had opinions about singer Lillian Russell’s generous figure.

Today, the media’s getting so fractured we don’t even know the same famous people. We’re long past the era when 100 million viewers would turn in to see how “M*A*S*H” turned out. There’s still the Super Bowl, for which a large chunk of the country gathers around the TV in a touching show of faith that this is going to be the year when it isn’t boring. But mainly we surf around for our own special favorite things — the Danish drama on Hulu, the Miley Cyrus video, the blog about “Hogs Gone Wild.” Then on weekends we get together for a multigenerational dinner and talk about ... ourselves. Or the salad.

Or Hillary. It must be an ungodly burden to be both the most important political figure outside the White House and perhaps the last great all-purpose celebrity on the map. She’s so familiar she’s like a family member — even to the political right, although in that case it’s something along the lines of a wicked stepmother. Rush Limbaugh recently entertained the theory that Clinton had “staged or set up” the shoe-throwing incident, although, really, if you were going to try to get attention with that kind of event, you’d have picked someplace more elevating than the scrap recyclers.

For the right, Clinton is responsible for nearly everything bad that occurs in the world, including the terrible kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls — which happened either because Benghazi made us look weak (Laura Ingraham) or because the State Department never formally designated Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organization. Also, Chelsea got pregnant because her mother wanted the positive press. Somewhere, right now someone is working on a story that will reveal that Hillary Clinton started the elevator fight between Jay-Z and his sister-in-law.

Everybody — right, left and middle — is talking about her presidential candidacy even though we’ve got more than two years before the presidential nominating convention. Karl Rove made headlines when he reportedly mused that Hillary might be able to conceal a “traumatic brain injury” during a run for the White House. (His estimate that she had spent “30 days” in the hospital after a fall last year was a mere 26 days off.) But Rove was not really worried that the public would fail to take a look at the health issues of all the presidential candidates when the race really begins. He was just keenly aware that without Hillary gossip, he might be stuck analyzing the presidential prospects of the current Democratic field: Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

It’s hard to imagine what it must feel like to belong to everybody in such an intimate way. There’s no one else in the same situation. Barack Obama is universally known, but these days, if you have a conversation at the dinner table about him, the real topic is going to be something like health care or the unemployment rate. We’re so aware of his enormous responsibilities, we’ve sort of lost interest in Obama as a person. He may try to be diverting with the odd comment about sports or his dog, but, really, it doesn’t work.

This is why Hillary Clinton is going to run for the White House. She wants to be president so people will stop talking about her.