If Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin ’s resignation was partly based on avoiding media attention it raises questions about her potential presidential run in 2012, a top former White House official said Sunday.

“The media, if she wants to run for president, is going to be following her intensely for the next three years,” said Karl Rove, an adviser to President George W. Bush .

Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee made the surprise announcement July 3, was facing a rocky road to the end of her term with falling approval numbers, criticism that she was paying too much attention to national matters and not the state, continuing ethics inquiries, efforts by news organizations to obtain e-mails written during the 2008 campaign and stories about her family that were grist for tabloids and even late-night comedian David Letterman.

“If she wanted to escape the ethics investigations and save the taxpayers money, she’s now done that, but it sort of sent a signal that if you do this kind of thing to a sitting governor like her, you can drive her out of office,” Rove said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“Also, she’s not going to be able to escape media attention,” he said. “If she thinks somehow that she’s going to be able to protect her family against the kind of things that she’s suffered over the last couple of months from David Letterman and others, and seek a role of leadership for effective change for our country, as she said in her speech, she’s not going to be able to do it.”

In her resignation announcment, Palin also cited high legal fees faced multiple ethics complaints that had been filed against her or her staff, calling it “political absurdity, the politics of personal destruction,” and she and her family are “looking at more than half a million dollars in legal bills just in order to set the record straight.”

On June 23rd, Palin’s office announced that the 15th ethics complaint filed against her or her administration that had been dismissed. The June 23rd case alleged that a staffer used her position for personal gain by traveling with Palin.

Alaska’s Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell, who also appeared on the program, said he also considered the ethics probe part of the “weight” Palin felt in relation to her ability to govern.

“You know, I think what I heard from the governor really had to do with the weight on her, the concern she had for the cost of all the ethics investigations and the like, the way that weighed on her with respect to her inability to just move forward Alaska’s agenda on behalf of Alaskans in the current context of the environment,” he said. “... and the fact it was costing just about $2 million of state taxpayers’ dollars just to fund the staff to deal with the records requests and the like, and that was just over the top, and I think she used the word ‘insane’ in her remarks.”

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a presidential hopeful in 2008, said that reason could be a liability for Palin if she’s contemplating a White House run.

“If that had been the case for me, I would’ve quit in my first month,” Huckabee said on “Fox News Sunday.” “The danger that Sarah Palin faces — and let me be very quick to tell you, in the way of full disclosure, I’m a Sarah Palin fan.... The challenge that she’s going to have is that there will be people who say, ‘Well, look, you know, if they chase you out of this, it won’t get any easier for you at other levels of the stage.’ ”

Rove also called himself a fan of Palin’s but also cited the lack of clarity as to any strategy in her move.

“The effective strategies in politics are ones that are so clear and obvious that people can grasp it,” he said. “It is not clear what her strategy here is by exiting the governorship 2 1/2 years through the term and putting herself on the national stage that she may not yet be prepared to operate in.”