The handlers of George W Bush had a bad moment the other night. The talk shows have had endless fun with the fact that Bush Lite cannot rescue various foreign politicians from obscurity by remembering their names. But 249m Americans cannot remember these names, either, and the shrewd people around the front-runner for the presidency reckon failure in a trivia quiz is a plus. Jonathan Chait reports in the New Republic that they have confided their pleasure in the booboo because it makes their man seem like a normal guy.

This may not be spin. There is a deep-rooted anti-intellectual strand in the American political psyche, most brilliantly mined by Ronald Reagan. The normal-guy posture wobbled a bit subsequently when Bush let slip, under pressure, that he was reading Dean Acheson's famous autobiography Present at the Creation, but the necessary course correction was swiftly made when he shared a stage for the first time with his five Republican rivals. Asked to say, in a televised debate at Phoenix, what he had learned from Acheson, he replied with a rote recitation of standard lines from his foreign policy stump piece that offered no suggestion he had actually absorbed something from Acheson. Close call.

There must have been consternation in the Bush box when he and Steve Forbes, the wealthy publisher, got to gassing about natural gas. It was not that he revealed he knew something about the subject; that lapse into substance would be forgivable in a man from Texas, the state which lives on oil and gas.

But here, from the transcript, is the crunch. Bush: "The demand for gas is finally come back, as you know, Mr Forbes. And so I've got great hope..."

Forbes: "You can call me Steve."

Bush: "Let me finish, excuse me."

Forbes: "Call me Steve."

Bush: "I will call you Steve. The natural gas business is coming back."

And moments later:

Bush: "John McCain, Senator, as the governor of Texas..."

McCain: "Call me John."

The badinage, in which for a moment Bush Lite appeared to be Bush Heavy Metal, was symptomatic of the debate where everyone was eager to copy Bush and score even the tiniest points for style. This is because there are deep divisions between the Christian right and the moderates that nobody wants to inflame.

Take abortion. In Phoenix, the candidates had an opportunity to put a rival on the spot with two questions. All of them missed a chance on a subject that until recently was such a priority it was official party policy to insist that candidates commit to an anti-abortion constitutional amendment.

Gary Bauer, the leading anti-abortion activist, at one time seemed all set to make it his single issue theme. But he made the barest of references to the issue; and so, too, with Steve Forbes who did not mention it at all. It would have been a wonderful moment for one or all of the pro-lifers to pin down the Bush main challenger - call him John. He entered the election as an opponent of abortion. Now he speaks with forked tongue, saying to Tucker Carlson in Talk magazine that both pro-life and pro-choice camps "share the same goal".

George W Bush, similarly, has been skirting an issue he once endorsed. He now subscribes to a philosophy with the grand name of "incrementalism", meaning that while he is still against abortion, the law cannot be changed "until hearts and minds are changed." Elizabeth Dole, before she dropped out, struck the same cautious note.

Two things are going on. If asked, 55% of voters say they favour keeping abortion generally legal, 41% generally illegal.

But fewer people are raising abortion as a concern. It does not surface in most issue polls. In the only one it did recently, it was at 17%, way below the 60-70% concerns with education and crime. For Bush or anyone else to present the traditional Republican position is to risk losing votes, especially among women. A majority party has to be open to people on both sides of the issue. The debate has narrowed, in fact, to the late-term procedure called "partial birth" abortion which critics say amounts to infanticide.

The second element at work is that the religious right is in a fix. It has no single candidate it can unite behind for the nomination. Buchanan has gone to the Reform party. The anti-abortion conservatives Bauer, Forbes and Keyes split the religious vote - and Bauer spends most time attacking Forbes on free trade, not Bush on abortion. If Bauer dropped out in favour of Forbes, or vice versa, the right would have a candidate who could put pressure on Bush with abortion as the obvious nerve point.

It is 30 years next March 3 since Linda Coffee went to the Dallas courthouse to file a complaint (Roe v Wade) that eventually undid the state law allowing abortion only when a mother's life was in danger. Anti-abortion activists may mark the occasion with another outburst of violence; there has been a run of clinic bombings this year. Anything of that kind, which would be deeply unpopular, still less another murder of a doctor, would fall awkwardly as the primary season accelerates.