Christmas may not be a day of comfort and joy for dozens of campaign workers.

Political Scene has learned that just three presidential candidates had submitted enough signatures as of yesterday to qualify for Rhode Island’s primary ballot. The deadline for submitting 1,000 signatures is Wednesday, the day after Christmas, thanks to a recent law change that requires signatures be collected in the heart of the holiday season.

Republicans, who traditionally have a hard time rallying support in Rhode Island, are particularly fearful that several candidates won’t appear on the March 4 ballot due to lack of signatures.

“Based on our progress so far, we are very concerned that we will fail in this effort to get our 10 GOP candidates on the ballot,” Republican operative Dave Talan said in an e-mail to 5,500 GOP families late last week. “Candidates relying solely on R.I. volunteers are in trouble.”

The secretary of state’s office reported yesterday that only Democratic frontrunners Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have submitted the necessary signatures. On the Republican side, only Rudy Giuliani hit the 1,000 mark.

Where do the other key candidates stand?

Mitt Romney had submitted just 771; John McCain, 706; Ron Paul, 484; Mike Huckabee, 244, and Fred Thompson, 202. As for the Dems, John Edwards has submitted 416; Christopher Dodd, 254, and Dennis Kucinich, 199. Bill Richardson turned in just 15 signatures, while Joe Biden had yet to submit one.

Is it really that hard to collect 1,000 signatures?

This Political Scene reporter late last week fended off signature requests by several campaign volunteers scrambling to fill their quota. And while each party has hundreds of volunteers, most of the major candidates have paid staff coordinating the signature collection.

But Talan noted that even those candidates are having trouble this year.

“All the national campaigns tell us that Rhode Island and New York are the hardest two states to get into,” state GOP Chairman Giovanni Cicione told Political Scene. “These signature dates fall right into the holiday period. … It’s hard to get people to stop to sign when they’re out there shopping for the holidays. Weather’s also been an issue.”

And things certainly weren’t made any easier by a law change pushed by the secretary of state’s office during the last legislative session that moved the signature collection period to December from November.

The change requires that signatures be submitted at least 88 days before the presidential primary, instead of on Nov. 30. It was intended, according to the secretary of state’s spokesman, Chris Barnett, to make the deadline more flexible in case the General Assembly moved the date of the primary — something that would have happened this year if not for Governor Carcieri’s veto.

“Even with the previous dates in the law, those dates were dates around a major holiday [Thanksgiving]. When you have a primary in February or March, that is just par for the course,” Barnett said. “All the campaigns are on an equal footing under the new calendar scenario.”

At State House, snow team was no team, Kass says

The governor’s communications director, Steve Kass, views the Dec. 13 snow storm that stranded drivers and schoolchildren for hours as “reinforcement” for his belief that the governor and lieutenant governor should be “bracketed” on the ballot, so a vote for one is a vote for both.

You will recall that Republican Governor Carcieri did not even tell Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts, a Democrat, that he was leaving for a week in the Middle East. (Carcieri initially backed Kernan “Kerry” King, the retired insurance executive who is now his State House legal counsel, for the post. King, however, lost the GOP primary to former state Adjutant Gen. Reginald Centracchio, who lost to Roberts.)

Asked what difference it might have made in the handling of the storm if Carcieri had had a lieutenant governor of his choosing back in Rhode Island, Kass said: “If you’re the governor and the lieutenant governor is part of your team and you have philosophical similarities, etcetera, it’s easy for the governor to be out of the country or out of state and his right-hand guy is in charge and there is no political stuff going on between the two, which there always is in this state.

“That’s a natural to me,” said Kass, who pushed the same idea as a 1980s-era Constitutional Convention delegate and remains perplexed why it wasn’t embraced by the public. “Would you run your company with one guy at the top and the deputy is trying to get his job? It’s just not good. … I don’t know why Rhode Islanders like that.”

(In 1982, state voters rejected, 135,832 to 129,459, a proposal to elect the governor and lieutenant governor as a team, according to the state Board of Elections.)

Asked why Carcieri did not tell the lieutenant governor he was leaving, Kass said: “You’d have to ask him as to the why of it, but from what I have observed over the years there doesn’t seem to be a lot of cooperation between one party and the other on anything.”

For the record, in responding to questions on talk radio last week, Carcieri said he did not hold Kass, his $126,541-a-year communications director, responsible for what he earlier in the week called his administration’s “poor job” of communicating with the public, in his absence during the storm.

“This is a responsibility that starts with the EMA (Emergency Management Agency) and then goes up to the general who is in charge of [the] National Guard and EMA,” he said of Adjutant Gen. Robert Bray, “and then to me.”

EMA director Robert J. Warren was fired last week; Bray, who called in sick the day of the storm, remains.

Fogarty — remember him? — ends his ‘exile’

In the days following the snow storm, former Lt. Gov. Charles J. Fogarty emerged from what he calls his year of self-imposed exile.

Called by one reporter after another for his memories and perspective on how the state Emergency Management Agency handled earlier snow and hurricane events, Democrat Fogarty also talked to Political Scene for the first time about what he has been doing since losing his bid for governor to Carcieri, as he hit the term limit on his eight-year run as lieutenant governor.

“My year in exile has ended!” he declared jubilantly in an e-mail.

Since this fall, he said, he has been teaching a two-day-a-week course called “Foundations of Leadership” to juniors and seniors at Johnson & Wales.

“The course deals with the basic principles that are important in the development of leaders including: ethics, communication, motivation, team building, diversity and taking risks. Part of the class involves case studies. And this week I used the recent snow storm debacle as a real-life example of leadership gone awry. The (Providence Journal) front page headlines from Saturday and Tuesday were perfect props!

“I have committed to teach @ J&W for a year and we’ll see what happens after that,” he wrote.

Fogarty said he also serves on the public affairs committee of an organization called the Quality Institute that has been working on a health-information exchange program for Rhode Island; is on the board of the Hope Alzheimer Center in Cranston, and has “just finished serving as co-chair for Meals on Wheels fundraising efforts for 2007.”

“I’m keeping an eye open for other challenging opportunities that may become available in the health care or education fields,” he said.

Manni leaves Office of Health, Human Services

Tracey Manni, a contracted spokeswoman for the state Office of Health and Human Services, is calling it quits. She finished clearing out her office in the Pastore Complex on Friday and has no plans to return to state government after 10 years off and on.

Manni has played a key role in providing information to the media in recent months regarding cuts to popular programs such as state-subsidized child care and RIte Care. She said the controversial moves have nothing to do with her departure. Nor was she a victim of Governor Carcieri’s plan to eliminate hundreds of state contractors.

“I think it’s just a good time to leave,” she told Political Scene. “I feel like trying something new.”

Manni, 42, will take a job with the URI Foundation, a private entity that manages the endowment and major charitable contributions for the University of Rhode Island. Manni will manage the foundation’s communications.

She said she will miss her coworkers, but not her office location at the Office of Health and Human Services, which is tucked between the minimum and medium security units of the Adult Correctional Institutions in Cranston.

Manni said she’s not aware of any immediate plans to hire a replacement.

kgregg@projo.com