The 28th Amendment is a timely and compelling political thriller that explores the very real potential for conflict between entertainment and politics in a media-defined age. 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.
Neal Rechtman studied writing with Alan Lelchuck and J.R. Humphreys, and published his first short story during his senior year of college (1975). Beginning in 1976 his body was inhabited by an entrepreneur, a husband, a father of two sons, and several lesser personalities, until in 2004 it was finally re-occupied by its original ''writeful'' owner.
The 28th Amendment is the first product of this last transformation.
Neal lives in Ossining, NY with his wife Jane. His two sons have grown up and left home, so Neal spends much of his non-writing time playing bridge at the local bridge club, where he actually does encounter the singleton king of spades with astonishing frequency.
