In late 2002, an obscure Illinois state senator, Barack Obama, was eyeing a run in the 2004 Democratic Party primary for a U.S. Senate seat. He would be up against seemingly prohibitive favorites, one who would have the backing of the party’s establishment, the other with a personal fortune to spend.

But David Axelrod, a prominent Democratic political consultant, thought somebody like Obama -- “bright, principled, skilled legislatively” -- ought to be in the U.S. Senate. At a meeting at his firm, Axelrod made his case for taking on Obama as a client. Yet as David Plouffe, an Axelrod partner, recalls in his new book “The Audacity to Win,” not everybody was persuaded. “ ‘Let me get this straight,’ summed up one of our colleagues. ‘We should work for the candidate with no chance, no money, and the funny name?’ ”

Axelrod’s long-shot client won his U.S. Senate seat in large part because Obama’s opponents in both the 2004 primary and general election self-destructed. And to a significant extent, history repeated itself in Obama’s run for the White House. Strategic blunders by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign gave Obama the opening he needed to steal the nomination from her. By the fall, with the economy tanking, if John McCain ever had a chance to avoid electoral doom, he sealed his fate by tapping controversial Sarah Palin as his running mate and making other head-scratching political moves.

After reading Plouffe’s engaging, detailed and frequently illuminating account of the Obama presidential campaign, one can see how the campaign was lucky and good -- indeed, often very, very good.

Plouffe, the campaign manager, and his sidekick Axelrod, the campaign’s message guru and all-around troubleshooter, sat on top of a sprawling yet disciplined and creative operation. The discipline started with the campaign’s unwavering commitment to do just about anything to win the Iowa caucuses, the first contest of the presidential primary season. “I really don’t think we have a choice,” Plouffe recalls Axelrod saying during the early planning stages of the campaign. “It’s Iowa or bust.”

Underestimating Obama’s potential as a rival, the Clinton campaign was slow to react to Obama’s huge grass-roots organizing effort in Iowa. Talented, young organizers were attracted to the campaign and flooded every Iowa county.

When Obama was declared the winner in Iowa, it reset the entire primary process. Although there would be stumbles along the way in New Hampshire and a few other states, and a crisis or two over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, after Iowa, Plouffe makes clear, the Obama campaign felt it was in the driver’s seat. “The state became our laboratory, and much of what we would do and try later in the campaign was a direct result of the lessons learned there.”

One of those lessons was the power of the Internet to recruit volunteers, keep supporters informed and inspired, and to raise money. Obama’s online fundraising was phenomenal: In the biggest month, September 2008, the campaign raised $150 million, more than two-thirds coming from online contributions.

About two-thirds of “The Audacity to Win” is about the presidential primary; indeed, the general election seems something of an anticlimax. Plouffe and his colleagues were contemptuous of the Clinton campaign’s ineptness personified, in their view, by pollster Mark Penn. They were baffled by the Clinton operation’s failure to compete effectively in the caucus states, where Obama’s victories essentially gave him the nomination.

Plouffe does not give us the lowdown on how Obama really felt about Clinton, nor is he inclined to reveal much about Obama’s warts (a few exceptions: The candidate did not take kindly to staff critiques of his speeches and would rather watch ESPN late at night than do his campaign homework).

And, surprisingly, Plouffe writes little about the topic of race. In Iowa, for example, he says race was “largely a nonfactor.” Perhaps that’s true in a narrow sense, but, as political observers noted at the time, Iowa was important not only because it was there that Clinton lost her aura of invincibility, but also because an African-American presidential candidate won in an overwhelmingly white state.

In his final analysis, Plouffe writes “the reason we won comfortably ... was that among people voting for the first time in a presidential election -- or for the first time in a long time -- we won by a shocking 71-27 percent.” In this instance, the use of “we” seems right. Although Barack Obama was uniquely inspirational, thousands of young organizers and volunteers played indispensable roles in one of the greatest political dramas in American history.

Sanford D. Horwitt writes about politics and history. E-mail him at books@sfchronicle.com.

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