Hillary Clinton is not running for president — at least not by her own admission. But it’s been a month since the start of her “Hard Choices” book tour, and nearly all the elements of a presidential campaign have emerged. There are boisterous crowds, speeches, interviews, an appearance tonight on “The Daily Show,” lists with names and email addresses, attacks from the opposition, and gaffes.

The only thing the tour is missing is the central element of a campaign: a raison d'être, a vision. It’s missing this, of course, because to Mrs. Clinton, it is not a campaign. But no matter how many times Mrs. Clinton says she isn’t sure if she’s running in 2016, the rest of the world is sure she’s a candidate, and they are treating her like one.

That divergence makes this book tour risky for Mrs. Clinton, if she does run for president.

The ritual of introducing a national candidacy through a book goes back at least as far as John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage” and includes recent titles like Barack Obama’s “Audacity of Hope,” John McCain’s “Faith of my Fathers” and Mitt Romney’s “No Apology.” In each of these cases, the reader comes away with a sense of what made the author extraordinary, and the same is true of “Hard Choices,” with one exception. Most Americans first met Mrs. Clinton 22 years ago, and hardly anyone needs a primer on how she got to this moment.

According to survey data from Gallup, fewer than 5 percent of Americans have no opinion — favorable or unfavorable — of Mrs. Clinton. By way of comparison, two years before Mr. Romney’s first presidential bid, in December 2006, 69 percent of Americans had no opinion of him. In the same survey, Gallup asked people about Mr. Obama, and 47 percent of Americans couldn’t rate him. He would not reach Mrs. Clinton’s current level of familiarity until a couple of weeks before the Iowa caucuses in 2008.