The knock on President Clinton was that he never made a move without first consulting a public opinion poll. The knock on President Bush is that he acts on conviction, regardless of public opinion.

Clearly, there is no pleasing those who would knock a politician. But Karl Rove's decision to announce his resignation this week provides an opportunity to reflect on his unique role in the conviction-borne Bush administration.

Rove is, at heart, a Utahn. He learned politics in the halls of Olympus High, where, in his own description, he overcame tremendous odds to be elected student body president, helped by recruiting beautiful girls and popular athletes to his campaign. In an earlier interview with this newspaper, he cited several teachers and professors at Olympus and the University of Utah as his mentors. These were Democrats who taught him how to appeal to both ends of the aisle, he said.

It is a bit ironic, then, that he is seen today as someone who is a master at partisan politics, but who failed horribly at pushing a legislative agenda. Rove was the guiding hand behind both of George W. Bush's presidential elections. But his style has been cited by critics as an impediment to enacting the president's broad agenda.

Rove never lost the knack for winning elections that he learned at Olympus High. In some ways, George W. Bush seems an unlikely candidate for president in the media age. He isn't flashy. He doesn't deliver stirring sound bites. But Rove knew how to steer him through the mine fields and into office.

That happened to a large extent because Bush was guided by principles and certainties. But certainties often don't go too far in a Congress divided more or less evenly between Democrats and Republicans.

The president began his second term with a grand agenda that included Social Security and immigration reforms. He will leave with likely little of it enacted. Both issues are vitally important to the nation's future, but both bogged down in partisan politics. Rove's most crushing defeat was his inability to bring Republicans along on the immigration-reform bill.

Along the way, his tenure was clouded by the CIA-leak scandal that resulted in the conviction of White House official I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, by the ongoing probe into the firings of several U.S. attorneys, and by the war cloud that has engulfed the entire administration.

Rove's critics undoubtedly overstate his role. But he did have a great influence in the current administration.

As he undoubtedly learned at Olympus High, politics is a contact sport. He played it to win, and his opponents are only too happy to kick him on the way out. But no one can accuse him of bending his convictions to fit popular will.