Does Mrs Clinton really know someone everywhere she goes?

During Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, I was continually amazed at how, whichever state she happened to be in, she would engage in manic waving and pointing at someone in the crowd whom she appeared to recognize.

Given that this was done from under bright spotlights that must have made it more or less impossible to see anyone at all in a large audience, I assumed that she must have been acting on the advice of image-handlers, who thought it might work in her favour if she were seen to have friends everywhere she went.

Now that she's US Secretary of State, such a ploy would seem to be even more pointless, but a picture in today’s Daily Telegraph shows Mrs Clinton engaged in identical manic waving at someone a crowd in Seoul, Korea – which has got me wondering whether she really does have a global network of friends or suffers from some kind of obscure Pavlovian response whenever she finds herself in front of a crowd.