I ONCE HAD a boss who, in the throes of frustration with me (not an uncommon state among bosses I have known), told me that one of these days, “You’re going to have to make up your mind whether you want to be right, or you want to be effective.”

Of course, I wanted to be both. But if absolutely forced to choose, I would dig in and choose the former, and go down in flames if necessary. Hence his frustration.

He was definitely on to something. I’ve had a number of setbacks in my career based on that very propensity. Still, I tend to want politicians to exhibit a similar trait. I keep wanting politics to be about honestly advocating what you believe at all times, and stoically accepting the consequences if your ideas prove to be insufficiently popular to have the effect you desire.

But outside the civics books, it doesn’t work that way. And outside of a Frank Capra movie, the pure, burning virtue of a righteous cause does not automatically carry all before it.

The admiration of voters, and of the history books, hinges to a great extent on whether a given politician is effective. This is ever so much more true of one’s fellow politicians, particularly those in legislative bodies. You can be right or you can be wrong, but if you’re effective, friends and foes will look upon you with respect — respect that is like money, in that you can spend it to get other things done in the future.

Last week, Gov. Mark Sanford — whose constant insistence on being right (according to his own definition of right) has been an extreme irritant to state lawmakers — decided to be effective.

By backing off, at least for now, from his plan to sue the Legislature over the putrid pile of bad ideas dumped into the Life Sciences Act, the governor chose to give the angry House Republicans a chance to clean up their act on bobtailing, rather than trying to force them to do it. (Never mind that, communication glitches aside, he was right on the issue and they were wrong.)

He didn’t so much give up on being right as he throttled back a bit on the point in order to be effective. And it seems to have worked, up to a point — at least in terms of his working relationship with House Republicans.

What the governor insists he did not do is “blink.” No Khrushchev he. “The one thing I don’t have a history of doing is blinking.” Which is true enough. As he points out, when he was a congressman, he would “not bat an eye” about being the one in a 434-1 vote.

He said he voted regularly against his own Republican leadership during his six-year, self-limited tenure in Washington. He was, for instance, one of the fire-breathers who voted to keep the government shut down even as Bill Clinton was killing the GOP over that issue.

Of course, whether you call it blinking or batting or whatever, the fact is that the governor’s decision last week is a definite departure from his maverick shenanigans in the U.S. House. He acknowledges that, explaining that the different situations call for different tactics. “If I believe in the thing, I’m going to go for it,” he insists, but adds, “You see somebody who at the same time recognizes the reality of the political situation.”

The way he tells it, his radicalism in Congress — he calls it “being one of the outlyers,” as opposed to dwelling in the middle of the political bell curve — was calculated. He says that “unless you’re willing to spend your life in the institution,” you’ll never accomplish anything by being in the middle. For a self-designated short-timer, being more extreme “is the only card you’ve got.” If you play it often enough, he says, you might eventually have the satisfaction of seeing the middle move a degree or two in your direction, even if you never completely get your way.

And the political cost of such a strategy is negligible. “You get Newt Gingrich mad at you for a week, so what? What’s he going to do to you?” Nothing that you would care about, if you’re planning on going home soon anyway. Consequently, “Any suit that comes along, you cast it,” he explained. “Any issue that comes along, you damn the torpedoes.”

But when you’re actually expected to govern — or as he puts it, when you’re “one of one” instead of “one of 435” — a different approach is called for. Given that there are things he actually wants to accomplish, he recognizes that he has to get people to work with him. But he’s not giving up on being right.

“Politics always ought to be about lofty ideals,” he said. As he tries to put ideals into practice, he said he would consistently do two things: “constructively engage,” and at the same time “nudge” governmental institutions to be more accountable.

For a year and a half, he and his staff have been slipping and sliding on a steep learning curve, trying to do those two things. Did they get some traction and actually move up the slope a bit last week? And if they did, is that a good thing or bad thing for South Carolina?

On the first question, House Speaker David Wilkins says there is “a renewed energy” and “optimism” in interactions between House Republicans and the governor. He said the relationship had peaked earlier with passage of the governor’s income tax cut plan, “then quickly ebbed a little bit” over the Life Sciences veto. “And now I think we’re on the way back.” In fact, on Thursday he consulted with the governor’s office over an ambitious laundry list of Sanford proposals the speaker says the House will try to advance by the end of the month.

As for the second question — well, that’s a good thing if you’re talking about restructuring, but a bad thing if you’re talking about the governor’s plan to give tax credits to those who send their kids to private schools.

It will be interesting to see which among several such pending proposals the House proves more eager to act upon.

Write to Mr. Warthen at bwarthen@thestate.com.