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If you didn't know better, you might think that aliens had taken possession of the body of Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot. In an earlier political life, he was a liberal Democrat from Montgomery County who always seemed comfortable on the party's left edge. During the years that Bob Ehrlich was the state's Republican governor, Franchot was one of his most persistent and vocal critics.

Franchot was once described in a Gazette editorial as a political gadfly. He was a prominent participant at the "progressive summits" that were held during the Ehrlich years. Senate President Mike Miller, during the slots debate, exchanged increasingly testy public letters with Franchot and a few years earlier expressed the desire to punch him in the nose.

And when I talked with Franchot for a column I wrote 17 months ago, he was feuding with many of the state's leading Democratic office holders, including both Gov. Martin O'Malley and Mike Miller. Franchot was the public voice of the opposition to the slots referendum, which furthered annoyed Democratic leaders in the state. It got so bad that the General Assembly started making serious threats to the Comptroller's Office budget. The culmination of the very public feud was the apparent recruitment by O'Malley of term-limited Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith to run against Franchot in the 2010 Democratic primary.

Things sure have changed since then. Smith recently announced that, despite having raised a lot of money for a possible campaign, he was not going to challenge Franchot in the primary. And last week, he all but announced that he would run for the 7th District state Senate seat currently held by Andy Harris. Harris, in turn, is expected to try again in the first congressional district after having lost to Frank Kratovil in 2008.

From facing a serious and well-financed primary challenge a few months ago, Franchot now looks like he won't have any significant opposition in either the primary or the general election in 2010.

That reversal of political fortune was not merely a matter of luck. Franchot has traveled relentlessly since being elected and has carved out a public role that would have made him hard to beat even if Smith had stayed in the race. But the change of electoral prospects isn't the biggest transformation concerning Peter Franchot.

When I talked to him recently, his description of how well his office is running included the observation that "no news is good news." What Franchot meant was that when everything is running smoothly and efficiently, the press is not particularly interested, but those were not words that anyone who has followed Franchot's career would have ever expected to hear from him. As the old joke about Franchot used to go, never get between him and a television camera.

Now, when you talk to him, he speaks enthusiastically about his business advisory committee and about the need to make government smarter, not bigger. Where once he had no trouble with being labeled a tax-and-spend liberal, today he admonishes his Democratic colleagues to rethink their views about government spending.

The comptroller told me about immersing himself in the details of his job, poring over the agenda of the Board of Public Works in order to save the taxpayers from wasteful state spending, and putting in time on the less glamorous duties of the office such as serving on the state pension board. And he keeps traveling around the state, having just returned from a visit to Garrett County.

In September, Franchot filed to run for another term as comptroller, thereby squelching those rumors that he might try to challenge O'Malley for governor in 2010. And with the path apparently cleared for a relatively easy re-election next year, it seems like all the drama has gone out of Peter Franchot's political life.

But unless your mind runs toward alien abductions, there's something wrong with that conclusion. Peter Franchot is and always has been a smart and ambitious politician. After his side was beaten in the slots referendum and he found himself on the outs with all of the other Democratic leaders in the state, he made some major adjustments. He lowered his public profile, stopped commenting on every issue under the political sun, and began to focus on those activities that everyone agreed were in the job description of the comptroller.

And he seems to have redefined himself in terms of political philosophy. He no longer represents a district that was comfortable with his ultra-liberal approach to policy and politics. He managed to win a divided Democratic primary in 2006 and seems to have realized that his statewide constituency is markedly different from that of his former legislative district. He now sounds much more like a person you can trust to take care of your money, and the state's money. He has turned into a fiscal conservative.

All of that is likely to be enough to get him another term as comptroller. The bigger question is whether it will make him a serious candidate for governor in 2014.

Laslo Boyd is a partner at Gonzales Research and Marketing Strategies. He also teaches courses at both Towson University and the University of Baltimore. His e-mail address is lvboyd@gmail.com.

Correction: The original version of this story incorrectly spelled Bob Ehrlich's name.