The 28th Amendment

What happens when an actor who portrays a fictional US president on television gets drawn into real-word politics? In Neal Rechtman's future political thriller The 28th Amendment, set in the year 2019, an actor named Victor Glade plays the President in a long-running television series called The Oval Office, and does his job a little too well embarrassing and threatening the Administration of the real President, Republican Burton Grove. When a wealthy fan of The Oval Office launches a campaign to draft Glade into the 2020 presidential race, Glade insists he won t run, and instead discharges his civic duty by endorsing the 28th Amendment a proposal to replace private campaign contributions with public funding for federal elections. The already-paranoid Grove Administration, vehemently opposed to the 28th Amendment, soon concludes that The Oval Office is no longer just a television show but also an unregistered political party, and tries to shut it down. The result is a startling, twisting tale of espionage, domestic terrorism and presidential politics that pits the Grove Administration s theocratic Chief of Staff, Morely James, against the enormously popular Victor Glade and his coincidence-prone, card-playing lawyer Jeremy Lerner. By turns intelligent, fascinating, and outrageously funny, Rechtman's narrative works on several levels: it s a chilling parable of the US government s relentless stoking and exploitation of our nation s post-9/11 Osamaphobia; and in the realm of non-fiction, the 28th Amendment is an actual proposed amendment to the US Constitution that readers can support by signing a petition at the book s website, www.amendment-28.com.