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About the Book
Written when The West Wing was a popular TV series, The 28th Amendment explores a political landscape in which an actor portraying a fictional US president on television becomes embroiled in conflict with a real-world president who views the show as a threat to his struggling administration.
An actor named Victor Glade plays the the US 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 upcoming presidential race, Glade insists he won’t run, and instead discharges his civic duty by endorsing and promoting a 28th Amendment to the US Constitution—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 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.