Patty has been one in a million for Barack Obama.

Since early this year, she’s made more than 76,000 phone calls on behalf of his presidential bid and posted more than 1,300 blog entries on my.barackobama.com. Along the way, she amassed more “points” than anyone else among the million folks registered on MyBO, as the campaign Web site is known.

Then, without warning, MyBO this month eliminated its system of ranking supporters by accumulated points. In its place was a new “activity tracker” rating each member’s activism on a scale of 1 to 10.

Though upset at first, Patty was OK with the change.

But not everyone on MyBO reacted with equanimity. Many, like Lisa Holmes – an Obama precinct captain – felt their investment in the campaign had been looted overnight.

“People say it’s not about you, it’s about Barack,” Holmes said. “But it’s not. This is our campaign. We put him where he is. We invested in him.”

The dispute is the latest evidence of tension between the realities of a top-down campaign and the aspiration, at the same time, to be a bottom-up movement.

“Obama is the first candidate to use a social networking site and the first to find out about its downside and complications,” said Kevin Wallsten, a political scientist at Cal State Long Beach, who studies online politics.

And precisely because “Obama has blurred the line between who’s in the campaign and who’s not,” Wallsten said, disputes between MyBO’s management and its masses are nettlesome.

One of the more curious developments, increasingly clear since the primaries, is the level of dissent and sniping at Obama’s expense.

“You’d think the Obama site would be the most pro-Obama site on the Internet, but you can read plenty of bloggers who are far more pro-Obama,” Wallsten said.

Case in point: !(tilde)!tu amigo from King of Prussia, Pa., who joined 1,341 of the more than 15,000 affinity groups on MyBO and climbed to the No 2 spot under the old points system, second only to Patty.

On the dashboard of each MyBO member, just below his or her name, is a space to explain “Why I support Barack Obama.”

In !(tilde)!tu amigo’s case, the answer is: “I no longer do … He has thoroughly disappointed me during the Presidential Race.”

!(tilde)!tu amigo confirmed his disenchantment in an exchange of e-mail. “I have realized he would not be able to handle leading a nation as strong and influential as the United States of America,” he wrote.

Under the new system, !(tilde)!tu amigo’s ranking went from second to an “Activity Index” of 1, the lowest. This, as Chris Hughes wrote in an Aug. 7 post explaining the changes, is because the index “is time sensitive. The more work you’ve done recently, the higher the number will be.”

Hughes, 24, one of the founders of Facebook, has been described as the Obama campaign’s “online organizing guru.” In the Aug. 7 post, he gently chided those who had gamed the old system to climb to a higher MyBO perch.

“From the start, the emphasis was on quantifying an activist’s contribution to the campaign – not on encouraging people to rack up points for the sake of racking up points,” he wrote. “For some people, this wasn’t always clear.”

Hughes “unrolled” the points system in Aug. 27, 2007.

The system drew a few skeptical comments at the time. “It reminds me of my twins’ Kindergarten. I think they get points every time they wash their hands,” wrote Petra from Tucson, Ariz.

Others chided Petra for being a killjoy and an old head, out of touch with the ways of luring Internet-savvy young people to activism.

So it is perhaps surprising that the uncrowned queen of MyBO turned out to be Patty, a woman of an age that doesn’t disclose its age, who prior to joining MyBO had never blogged or even Googled.

Patty – she prefers to maintain her privacy by using only her first name – moved to Daniel Island, S.C., from Long Island. She is disabled, meaning she had lots of time to volunteer. And since January, she said, she has been on the phone for Obama, calling voters from lists provided through MyBO and even taping an audio tutorial on phoning for the site.

“I have given a minimum of eight hours a day, seven days a week,” she said, resting only Easter Sunday when friends advised her that her obsessive activism might invite the wrath of God. “This has been the most incredible journey I’ve ever been on,” she said.