ROANOKE, Va.  Where’s Miles Davis? Who kidnapped Elvis?

Up there on the riser in the Virginia arena, there is this careful guy reading from a teleprompter and keeping his tone not exactly monotone but not exactly soaring, and he is repeating more or less the same lines that he read the night before and the same lines he will read the day after.

Once, the artist formerly known as Barack Obama, the slim, smooth-faced fellow with the close-cropped hair and the trumpet of a voice would riff on 14 varieties of hope and propel crowds higher and higher until he sent them spinning out into the night ready to change the world. Teleprompters were for the earthbound.

Now this candidate, with noticeably more gray flecking his hair, is talking about “the changes and reforms we need.” He goes on about “a new era of responsibility and accountability on Wall Street and in Washington.” He hankers for “common-sense regulations to prevent a crisis like this from ever happening again.”

“Bottom-up growth,” he promises brightly.

What happened to the “fierce urgency of now”?

It is tempting, in contrasting the Obama of a year ago with the presidential candidate of today, to conclude that Miles Davis has turned himself into Barry Manilow. That is not quite the case; he still draws crowds  100,000 in St. Louis on Saturday  that would warm a rocker’s heart. And his words can still soar, as when he and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton formed a campaign duet Monday in Florida. But this Mr. Obama is a consciously, carefully, intentionally more grounded one, and a touch duller for the metamorphosis.