The Peronist party, proscribed since 1955, was allowed to run for the 1973 elections. The Peronist party won the elections, and Héctor Cámpora became President. Rodríguez Saá became a provincial legislator, and led the Peronist deputies in the chamber. He joined the right-wing Peronist unions, led by Oraldo Britos. He opposed the governor Elías Adre, who was aligned with left-wing Peronism. After the 1976 Argentine coup d'état, he left politics and worked in a law firm with his brother.
He attended the "Juan Pascual Pringles" school, which was associated with the National University of Cuyo. He studied law at the University of Buenos Aires, graduating in 1971. He worked as a Teacher in his former school for two years. He was an Editor of the anti-Peronist pamphlet "La voz de San Luis" (Spanish: The voice of San Luis), but became a Peronist in 1969 during his studies in Buenos Aires. He joined the Peronist Youth in the year of his graduation and worked as their representative in San Luis.
The National Reorganization Process dictatorship came to an end in 1983, when Raúl Alfonsín won the 1983 elections. Rodríguez Saá became governor of San Luis in those elections, in a close contest with the Radical Civic Union. He was helped by the clergy of the province, who opposed the radical candidate because of his secularism.
He ran in the primary elections of the Justicialist Party (PJ) for the 1989 presidential elections. Carlos Menem, governor of La Rioja, prevailed in both the primary and the main elections and became the new President of Argentina. Rodríguez Saá was elected to the Constituent Assembly that drafted the 1994 amendment of the Argentine Constitution. He attempted to run in the primary elections for the 1995 presidential elections against Menem, who was seeking re-election. Not seeing any chance of prevailing against the President, he abandoned his candidacy. He also attempted to run in the primary elections for the 1999 presidential elections, and resigned his candidacy again, this time on behalf of Eduardo Duhalde, governor of the Buenos Aires Province. Duhalde lost the elections to the radical Fernando de la Rúa, and Rodríguez Saá was again re-elected as governor. He attempted to divide the city of San Luis into four municipalities, as the mayor was a political rival, but had to drop the project because of the popular unrest generated by the proposal.
Adolfo Rodríguez Saá was kidnapped on October 21, 1993. He was governor of San Luis at the time. He was taken to a room in the hotel "Y no C" and forced to perform for a pornographic video. He was forced to pay a ransom of 3 million dollars and was left in the trunk of a car. The video has never been made public, and the kidnappers Walter Alejandro Salgado, Nélida Esther Sesín and Eduardo Alberto Doyhenard were sentenced in 1995. The trial took 11 days, and it included the testimonies of 132 witnesses. It was aired on live television. Esther Sesín claimed during the trial that she had been his lover for eight years. All the kidnappers have served their sentences and currently live in other provinces.
President Fernando de la Rúa resigned after the December 2001 riots that had been caused by the 1998–2002 Argentine great depression. As his vice President Carlos Álvarez had resigned as well months before, Congress called for a special assembly to designate a new President. Adolfo Rodríguez Saá became President after being elected with 169 votes to 138. He was supported by the PJ and smaller right-wing parties such as Republican Force and Action for the Republic. The Unión Cívica Radical (UCR) and Alternative for a Republic of Equals voted against him. He was replaced in the governor's office by vice-governor María Alicia Lemme, and took office on December 23, 2001.
Rodríguez Saá prepared a budget bill for 2002, which was sent to the Congress. It included an important decrease in the deficits, as requested by Anne Krueger from the International Monetary Fund. Krueger also requested a new coparticipation law, to determine the way the nation and the provinces manage tax revenues. Rodríguez Saá called for a meeting with governors in Chapadmalal, but only six governors out of twenty-three attended: Carlos Ruckauf, Juan Carlos Romero, Gildo Insfrán, Ángel Mazza, Carlos Rovira and Alicia Lemme. José Manuel de la Sota, governor of Córdoba, withdrew his support, suspecting that Rodríguez Saá had plans to cancel the elections and stay as President up to 2003. On December 30, he returned to San Luis with Daniel Scioli and resigned, alleging lack of support from the rest of the Justicialist Party. Insfrán, Maza and minister Rodolfo Gabrielli tried to convince him to stay as president; his brother Alberto Rodríguez Saá supported his decision. In announcing his resignation in a Cadena nacional, he recounted the achievements of his one-week administration and accused Justicialist governors and legislators of meanness and shortsightedness. He dispatched his resignation from San Luis to Buenos Aires, and the Congress accepted it on January 1, 2002. The Senate chairman Ramón Puerta would have been the interim President, but resigned as well, so Eduardo Camaño, President of the Chamber of Deputies, was appointed interim President instead. After new deliberations, they elected Eduardo Duhalde as President, this time with a mandate that would fill the remaining time of de la Rúa's mandate.
Rodrígues Saá has worked as a cattle rancher in San Luis since his defeat in the 2003 elections.
Rodríguez Saá was born to an important political family in San Luis. The Rodriguez Saá family is well known in the Province of San Luis and can be traced to the 19th century and to descendants of the federal caudillo Juan Saá, who fought in the battle of Pavón during the Argentine Civil War. Rodríguez Saá's grandfather and namesake Adolfo Rodríguez Saá and his great-uncle were both governors of the province, and his father was the police chief.
