WASHINGTON — Could Democrats regain the House of Representatives in 2014?

History says no, but New York Rep. Steve Israel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, says the combination of an improving economy and a Republican Party focused on investigating President Obama just might make it possible.

“It’s going to be hard, no question about it,” Israel said in an interview in his Capitol Hill office on “Capital Download,” USA TODAY’s weekly newsmaker video series. But “this country has an unquenchable thirst for less ideology and more solutions. … As long as our candidates are running as problem-solvers and solution-ists and a strategy of solutions, I think we have a good chance of winning the House.”

Over the past century, the party that has held the White House for two terms has lost House seats, sometimes dozens of them, in every midterm election except one. However, the exception was in 1998, during Bill Clinton’s second term — and that anomaly is fueling Democratic hopes of defying the political norm again next year.

“It was very similar to the climate that we have now,” Israel said. “The president gets elected, re-elected, in 1996. The Republicans in the House of Representatives make a decision to do everything they can to bring him down. … They launched 35 separate, partisan, witch-hunt investigations — and the Democrats won seats in the second midterm election of the Clinton presidency; won five seats.”

Democrats need to pick up 17 House seats to regain the control they lost to Republicans in 2010. Israel says there are 52 House seats “in play.” The non-partisan Cook Political Report now identifies 37 Democratic-held seats and 30 Republican-held seats as competitive or potentially competitive.

One big target for Democrats: Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who for a time sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 but only narrowly held on to her House seat in November. She faces a rematch against businessman Jim Graves. Israel said a campaign poll taken last week by the firm PPP for the Graves campaign put him ahead of Bachmann, 47%-45% — within the margin of error of 4.4 percentage points but a sign of a close contest.

The biggest boost for Democrats would be an improving economy, Israel said. “If the economy shows signs of health, then I think we have a much better climate in which to win the House.”

And he acknowledged concerns about the political impact of the Affordable Care Act as major provisions to cover the uninsured go into effect in January. Most states have declined to set up the exchanges where the uninsured will shop for coverage — defaulting instead to a federal marketplace — and close to half have raised questions about whether they will participate in the expansion of Medicaid to cover low-income Americans.

“There’s no question in my mind that many Republicans have made the calculation that they want the programs to fail in order say ‘I told you so,’ even though they’re responsible for the failure,” Israel said. “Where there are problems, whether they are inflicted by Republicans or they’re created by the natural growing pains of any new endeavor, we need to make sure those problems are solved, that people understand the benefits of this act.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

WASHINGTON —

Americans are divided over whether to believe the White House on controversies over the Libyan attack that killed a U.S. ambassador and the Internal Revenue Service targeting of Tea Party groups, but they overwhelmingly agree on this: The furors are going to make it more difficult for President Obama to get things done in his second term.

A USA TODAY poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research finds nearly three of four Americans say the controversies will make it harder for the president to accomplish his goals; nearly a third say they will make it much harder. Just one in five believe they won’t have an impact.

The nationwide poll, taken Thursday through Sunday, finds skepticism about some of Obama’s explanations of what happened. A 53% majority say the IRS decision to single out conservative groups for extra scrutiny before granting tax-exempt status was made for political reasons, something the administration flatly denies. By 50%-44%, they say Obama deserves at least a little of the blame, though the White House says he didn’t know about it until the scandal was in the news.

On the other hand, even more of those surveyed are cynical about why Republicans are pursuing investigations into the attack last fall that left U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans dead. Six in 10 say Republicans are holding hearings on it more to score political points against the Democrats and Obama than to find ways to prevent future attacks. Even a third of Republicans say the hearings are driven by politics.

“With the Republicans clearly in a posture of driving a political agenda, there’s a lot of risk for them, just as there’s risk for the president,” says Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist who was among a group that met with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough last week to discuss how the administration should move forward.

GOP pollster David Winston, an adviser to House Speaker John Boehner, points to the inclination by Americans to allot some of the blame for the IRS scandal to Obama. “It means they aren’t buying the Pfeiffer narrative,” he says. Senior White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer on five TV talk shows Sunday said the president hadn’t known about the targeting of conservative groups and acted appropriately when he learned of it.

Winston acknowledged GOP problems, too: “The public is looking at what’s going on and says neither one of them is doing what’s needed to address the problem.”

The issues don’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

Four congressional committees and the Justice Department are investigating the IRS. Douglas Shulman, a Bush appointee who headed the IRS during most of the questionable actions, is to testify today before the Senate Finance Committee and Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Finance Chairman Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, and ranking Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah on Monday sent outgoing IRS commissioner Steven Miller a letter with 41 detailed questions about what transpired in the agency.

Pfeiffer says the controversies don’t need to slow down work on other issues, including the push for an immigration overhaul.

“That’s a question that only Republicans can answer,” he said in an interview. “Immigration continues to progress along without much attention as all these issues were unfolding last week, and it didn’t seem to slow things down at all. If Republicans use these as an excuse to delay the people’s business, that’s one thing. If they continue to work with us, that’s another.”

A BLIP OR A TURNING POINT?

Harvard professor Joseph Nye, one of the nation’s leading presidential scholars, dismisses as overblown comparisons to big scandals that bedeviled previous second-term presidents, such as the Iran-contra affair during the Reagan administration. “It’s quite plausible a year from now or five years from now what we’re seeing this week or two may turn out to be a blip rather than a major turning point,” he says.

Even so, the impact is nonetheless costly for Obama, he says.

“It distracts him from other issues; obviously you’ve got to spend a fair amount of time on firefighting,” says Nye, whose new book is titled Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era. What’s more, he says, “in the election in 2012, you gain a certain amount of momentum which gives you a degree of authority. This chips away or undercuts that political momentum.”

The USA TODAY poll also asked about the disclosure that the Justice Department secretly had seized phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors while investigating a leak of classified information. In a showdown between the government and the news media, more than six in 10 Americans, 62%, say it is more important that the media be able to report stories they feel are in the national interest. Just 23% say it is more important that the government be able to censor news stories it feels threaten national security.

That is by far the highest level of support for the media in the 10 times the question has been asked over the past three decades in polls by Princeton Survey Research and Gallup. Only three previous times has a majority said it was more important to be able to report the story.

Those results reflect a swing by Republicans to the side of the press — possibly at least in part because doing so puts them at odds with the Democratic president. In 2006, the last time the question was asked, 53% of Republicans said it was more important that the government be able to censor news stories. Now, 53% say it’s more important that the media be able to publish.

The poll of 1,002 adults by land line and cellphone has a margin of error of +/-3.6 percentage points.

Among other findings, those surveyed:

Are divided over whether the Obama administration was involved in a political coverup about the Benghazi attack; 40% see a coverup while 45% don’t.

Disapprove of Obama’s handling of the attack and its aftermath by 44%-37%. His critics feel more intensity about the issue: 26% strongly disapprove, compared with 16% who strongly approve.

Say the IRS action targeting conservative groups was done for political reasons, 53%-33%. Nineteen percent say Obama deserves a lot of the blame for it; 31% say just a little.

PERILS OF BIG GOVERNMENT

Nearly six in 10 say the federal government threatens their rights and freedoms, a line of attack that Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans have hammered as a theme against Obama. Fifty-eight percent call the government a threat — 35% call it a major threat, 23% a minor threat — while 37% say it’s not a threat.

McConnell decried a “culture of intimidation” that he said linked the IRS controversy to the AP subpoena and even implementation of the Affordable Care Act, and Republicans predicted the controversies could expand as more information is uncovered. White House press secretary Jay Carney confirmed Monday that senior White House officials had been informed weeks ago about the IRS investigation but chose not to inform the president. And The Washington Post reported on its front page Monday on an aggressive investigation by the Justice Department into leaks to a Fox News Channel reporter.

“I have a hunch that a lot more is going to come out, frankly,” Baucus, a Democrat, told Bloomberg’s Capitol Gains TV program, referring to the IRS controversy. “And I think it’s important that we have the hearings, and I think that will encourage other information to come out that has not yet come out.”

So far, Americans don’t seem transfixed by any of them. In a

Pew Research Center Poll,

taken at the same time in the same omnibus survey as the USA TODAY poll, one in four said they were following the IRS and Benghazi stories “very closely”; just 16% were very closely following the story of the AP subpoenas. To compare, 30% were closely following news of the economy.

Other surveys haven’t shown them hurting Obama’s approval rating, at least so far. In a CNN/ORC poll taken Friday and Saturday, the president’s approval rating was 53%, up 2 percentage points from the previous survey in early April. In the Gallup daily poll, Obama’s approval rating Monday was 49%, in the same neighborhood it has been for a month.

“The general pattern with scandals is that the public doesn’t care very much,” says Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth who studies political scandals. “Only the most significant scandals move the needle on approval. The pattern is a collective shrug from the public, in part because the people who pay attention to political news already have made up their minds about the president one way or another.”

That doesn’t mean the controversies don’t matter, he cautions. “They clog up the news agenda and divert more of the interest of the media and the efforts of Congress into scandals and investigations instead of legislation.”

On that, Americans already agree.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

WASHINGTON – South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said Thursday that former secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton should return to Capitol Hill — under subpoena if necessary — to answer new questions about the attacks on a U.S. consulate in Libya that left four Americans dead.

In an interview on Capital Download, USA TODAY’s weekly video newsmaker series, Graham said the account of the Benghazi assaults last Sept. 11 offered by Clinton and other Obama administration officials had been undercut in congressional testimony Wednesday by three State Department officials, including Gregory Hicks, the No. 2 U.S. official in Libya at the time.

Hicks described a closer involvement by Clinton than previously known, including a phone call he received from her at 2 a.m. that deadly night. While the crisis unfolded, his pleas for a military response to the assaults were rejected. Afterward, he said he was castigated by Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, for talking about the attack with a member of Congress who was visiting Libya.

Graham, a leading critic of the administration on Benghazi, said he had played a role in arranging Hicks’ testimony.

“I got a call from a friend of his who said this Greg Hicks is really torn about what to do” about an official account of events he saw as inaccurate, Graham said. “So I got a phone number; I gave him a call. In March, we met here in the office. And I said, ‘I don’t know whether I can get the Senate to take this up, but the House is interested in finding out what happened in Benghazi.’”

He described Hicks as a reluctant witness. “He’s probably the typical State Department person — very diplomatic, very reserved — but this was gnawing at him,” Graham said. “It was really eating him up.”

Hicks testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., a fierce Obama critic.

In January, before she left the administration, Clinton answered questions about Benghazi at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, angrily rebuffing suggestions that the administration had misled Americans about the attacks for political reasons, seven weeks before Election Day. At the time, United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice said in a string of Sunday morning TV appearances that the attacks might have been a spontaneous uprising sparked by an anti-Muslim video that had been posted on YouTube.

In fact, Hicks testified, he and other U.S. officials in Libya immediately realized it was a planned attack by terrorists.

Graham, interviewed in his Senate office, said Clinton should return to Congress to address the issues raised. Should she be subpoenaed?

“I hope she would come back without that, but yes,” he replied. “I think she needs to come back and answer questions. Did she know that Cheryl Mills called the DCM (deputy chief of mission) to tell him, watch the member of Congress and don’t talk to him? And there’s now evidence that she was made aware of the security concerns and basically ignored security requests.”

He said Mills and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others also should be called to testify about the attacks. Those killed included Christopher Stephens, the first U.S. ambassador to die in the line of duty in a generation.

Republicans began this week to more openly hold Clinton responsible both for inadequate security at the consulate before the attack and for misleading characterizations about it afterward. Graham denied the criticism was partisan or an effort to dent the reputation of the leading prospect for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.

He noted Democrats had praised him during the Bush administration when he faulted then-Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then-vice president Dick Cheney on national security issues.

“When … we were pushing back against Rumsfeld and Cheney about Iraq in the early years, as not going well — it’s not a few ‘dead-enders’ — we were great patriots,” he said. “When you question Secretary Clinton and President Obama, it’s a little bit different from our Democratic friends.”

Follow @SusanPage on Twitter.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

WASHINGTON — Rhode Island Thursday became the 10th state to approve same-sex marriage, and the Delaware Legislature holds a key vote Tuesday on the same issue. But Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, denies there is a national tide in support of marriage rights for gay couples.

“I don’t know that I would say Rhode Island is a trend,” Brown said, also questioning victories for supporters of gay-marriage initiatives in Maine, Maryland and Washington State last November. “Again, we’re talking about states that are not necessarily indicative of the rest of the country. These are pretty deep-blue, liberal states we’re talking about.”

Even so, Brown, the head of the leading national organization opposing same-sex marriage, finds himself playing defense as more Americans support same-sex marriage and more state legislatures debate measures authorizing it. In an interview on Capital Download, a weekly video series on usatoday.com, Brown blasted “cultural elites” for demonizing supporters of traditional marriage and warned Republican officeholders of the perils of supporting same-sex marriage proposals.

Meanwhile, in Providence late Thursday afternoon, the Rhode Island House of Representatives voted 56-15 to give final approval to a bill legalizing gay marriage. Legislators then broke out in a spontaneous singing of My Country ‘Tis of Thee, and Gov. Lincoln Chafee signed the bill in a ceremony on the steps of the state capitol. All six New England states now allow same-sex marriage.

“A historic realignment is happening all around us,” said Chafee, a former Republican senator who said he became an independent in part because of the GOP’s stance on social issues. In an interview on MSNBC, the governor predicted the measure would carry economic and other benefits. “I want Rhode Island to be one of those hip, happening places, and tolerance is part of it,” he said.

Next Tuesday, the Delaware state Senate is slated to vote on a bill authorizing same-sex marriage that passed the House last week.

“In Delaware, it’s going to be a tough fight,” Brown acknowledged, calling it another solidly Democratic state.

But he was more optimistic about defeating gay-marriage proposals elsewhere. In Illinois, he said supporters of a bill that passed the Senate remain short of passage in the House, in part because of opposition from African-American Democratic legislators. In Minnesota, he said opponents had “a very good chance of winning” against a bill that has cleared House and Senate committees. In New Jersey, he predicted Democratic efforts to overturn Gov. Chris Christie’s veto of a bill authorizing same-sex marriage weren’t “going to go anywhere.”

In Oregon, he predicted advocates of same-sex marriage would succeed in getting a proposed constitutional amendment on the 2014 ballot that would reverse a ban on gay marriage voters passed a decade earlier. “I think we can win that vote even though Oregon, again, is viewed as a very liberal state,” Brown said.

He blamed Hollywood, academia and the mainstream media for advocating gay marriage and demonizing its opponents.

“The reality is that a lot of our cultural elite, in the media and academia, in Hollywood, have embraced a totally new conception of marriage, and they’re using their positions to try to make this new conception the norm and try to make people believe it’s inevitable,” he said. “And the goal of this whole inevitability argument is to sap the will of the majority of Americans to even fight on the issue, and that is not going to happen.”

A Pew Research Center poll in March found 70% of the millennial generation, those born after 1980, support same-sex marriage. Does that make its expansion inevitable over time?

“Well, of course it’s a challenge,” Brown said. “But this idea that somehow young people’s ideas are fixed and as they grow older they won’t change their ideas is not true. We believed all sorts of things when we were younger than we no longer believe.”

In an interview on USA TODAY’s Capital Download in January, Chad Griffin, head of the Human Rights Campaign, said support for gay marriage was increasing as more Americans became aware of gay men and lesbians they knew personally. Brown disputed that as an argument. “This is not about the civil rights of the folks that live down the hall,” Brown said. “This is about redefining a public truth, a public good.”

He warned Republican officeholders that supporting same-sex marriage “is a career-ending move.” Of Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, who recently announced he was switching positions in support, Brown said: “He’s guaranteed a primary.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

SEATTLE — And next?

Amanda Knox, the American college student who spent four years in an Italian prison, has been profiled this week by USA TODAY, People magazine and ABC’s Diane Sawyer in interviews pegged to the publication Tuesday of her memoirs, Waiting to Be Heard. In the book, published by HarperCollins, she chronicles the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher; the trial that convicted Knox of the crime; and the appeal that freed her to return home.

Now, in a video interview with USA TODAY, the 25-year-old looks ahead.

“When I left for Italy, I was still figuring out what I wanted to do,” she said. Since returning in 2011, “I’ve gone back to school. I’m going to be graduating and doing creative writing, and I want to continue writing. That’s what I want to do, and I feel like I can do.” She expects to graduate next spring from the University of Washington.

She says she has learned to avoid distractions and pay attention to what’s most important to her, including the family and friends who stood by her. “I think the more there is, the less you can focus on,” she says. She hopes to get married and have children down the road.

“When I have kids, I want to tell them what I learned from the experience” of being enmeshed in a notorious crime, she said. “I want to give them what I gained from it.”

What did she gain? “What I gained is the knowledge of myself, the confidence in myself and an understanding of how to go through a horrible experience and find a way to make your life worth it, and to do the right thing.”

She now faces a retrial, ordered in March by Italy’s highest court. She’s not required to attend the trial, and her lawyer has made it clear she won’t be there.

But she says she does hope to visit Italy again — as a tourist, not a defendant. “I became fluent in Italian while I was in prison and I do still use it,” she said. “I love to read Italian; it’s a really beautiful language. …

“As complicated as my relationship with Italy is, I really do want to go back. It’s a really beautiful country. It has a lot to offer humanity, and me.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

SEATTLE — As always, waiting was the hardest part.

Amanda Knox was waiting last month to hear the verdict from Italy’s highest court on her case, the sensational murder charges that had put the American exchange student in prison for four years before an appeals court reversed her conviction. Now back home, too anxious to stay in her small downtown apartment, she went to her mother’s house with her boyfriend and best friend. Her father and stepmother stopped over.

They decided to pass the time by watching a movie, settling on The Hunger Games.

Watching the story of a post-apocalyptic world didn’t exactly calm her nerves, “but it definitely was distracting, at the very least,” Knox says ruefully. The science-fiction film was forgotten when her lawyer called from Rome at 2 a.m. with news all too real. The Court of Cassation had ruled she would have to stand trial again for the 2007 murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher.

“It had gone as we had not foreseen and exactly as we had hoped against,” Knox said quietly in an exclusive interview with USA TODAY about her new book, Waiting to Be Heard, released today by HarperCollins. “It’s just this thing that’s laying so heavy on my heart right now.”

It was the first sit-down, face-to-face interview Knox had done with a reporter, followed by other interviews about her book with People magazine and ABC News’ Diane Sawyer. An ABC special, Murder. Mystery. Amanda KnoxSpeaks, airs at 10 ET tonight.

Her dream, however distant, of having Kercher’s parents take her to visit Meredith’s grave are on hold. Instead, she ruminates about returning to Italy for the new trial — her presence isn’t required — as a statement of what is at stake for her. The coming courtroom battles in Florence and Rome and, potentially, the United States may well stretch into years.

“I thought there was an end to the field of barbed wire, and it’s like it was just the hill,” she says, fighting back tears. She had reached “a crest” only to see more peril ahead before she finally might clear her name, reclaim her life and move on.

The decision to order a new trial came as Knox has returned to school at the University of Washington, started a long-term relationship with a musician boyfriend, eased the panic attacks she suffered in prison and afterward, and finished a book detailing her experiences and what she learned from them about perseverance and public identity.

The 463-page book chronicles her version of a story that has transfixed tabloid newspapers and cable TV on two continents. Italian prosecutors portrayed her as a manipulative, promiscuous “Foxy Knoxy” who helped kill her roommate when a sex-and-drug game went awry. She has become instantly recognizable and notorious, lumped in a skit on Saturday Night Live two weeks ago with the Unabomber and the Menendez brothers.

She portrays herself as a naive kid far from home who found herself enmeshed in a spiraling nightmare, the victim of an errant prosecution. Independent analysts have concluded that the microscopic DNA that helped convict her and her former Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, was mishandled and unreliable. She blames herself for misjudgments and missteps, especially for signing a statement indicating she was at the scene during the murder and implicating an innocent man. She says she did so only after a long and abusive interrogation and quickly recanted it.

After an interview in her hometown that stretches for five hours, it is hard to reconcile the prosecutors’ picture of a depraved murderer with the lithe, earnest 25-year-old trying to regain her footing. She had left Seattle in 2007 as a college junior eager for adventure and determined to learn a new language at the University for Foreigners in Perugia, Italy. Four years later, she returned graver, warier and fluent in the Italian she ended up perfecting in prison.

She didn’t cancel the long-scheduled session with USA TODAY despite the unexpected bad news from the Italian court five days earlier.

“This is my way of speaking up for myself,” she says. Doing the interview is a chore to be endured, she says, but after the travails of the past few years, “I don’t dread a whole heck of a lot. The only thing that I could really say is similar to dread is this waiting, and this not knowing what’s going to happen. Waiting was always the hardest part.”

AN IMPISH SIDE

Her quirky manner and delicate beauty was one reason Amanda Knox initially drew the suspicion of Italian law-enforcement officials. Her photogenic face, catnip for the paparazzi, helped ignite feverish coverage of her arrest and trial. The author of one of the dozen books about her case wrote that she bore “an uncanny resemblance to Perugia’s Madonna.” Shoulder-length brown hair frames her oval face. She has blue eyes and a wide grin, though she flashes it less often than she once did.

An impish side still occasionally breaks through. During a photo-taking session at a local park, she tries to loosen her staged pose using advice a photographer friend once gave her. “Squirm!” she shouts at herself, jumping and wiggling, then settling with a smile at the camera.

During an extended sit-down interview, though, she is contained, serious and still. She pauses to ponder questions and audibly exhales in relief when she finishes an answer. She responds directly even at times when her lawyers (who weren’t present) might have preferred a dodge.

Will she return to Italy for her retrial?

“My lawyers have said that I don’t have to and that I don’t need to. I’m still considering it, to be honest,” she replies. She has been turning it over in her mind since the court decision. “It’s scary, the thought. But it’s also important for me to say, ‘This is not just happening far away from and doesn’t matter to me.’ So, somehow, I feel it’s important for me to convey that. And if my presence is what is necessary to convey that, then I’ll go.”

She added that she wanted to understand the legal risks before making a decision. Now her lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, has announced that Knox won’t return to Italy for it.

Her legal future is full of uncertainty. The Italian high court has another two months before it’s required to release a decision explaining its ruling. The justices’ reasoning will help shape the retrial at an appeals court in Florence. That verdict, for conviction or acquittal, could be appealed again to the high court.

In her worst-case scenario — if the appeals court convicts her, and the high court upholds that conviction — Italy could seek her extradition from the United States to finish her 26-year prison term, set by the trial court in 2009.

The negotiations over that might become a diplomatic and legal showdown that breaks ground in transnational law. “National boundaries are counting much less today as we travel more, so we’re going to see more of this,” Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz says. “But we haven’t seen a case like this” before.

For Knox, concerns about a conviction are, naturally, more personal.

“There’s always a possibility, is my understanding of the way it works, just because there are human failings in a justice system,” she says. “I would hope that, should that ever happen — and I don’t think it will — people would still believe in me no matter what a legal system says when it’s wrong. That would be my hope. I don’t know if it would mean they would take me back to prison. I don’t know.” She pauses.

“I sincerely hope not, and I have a life that I want to live, I want to have the right to live. And I guess the one thing that I can say is, I’ve already confronted in my mind the thought that I would never leave prison.”

MAKING TO-DO LISTS

The night before her initial conviction was overturned by an appeals court, Knox drew a line down a page in her journal. She wrote side-by-side lists of what she would do under the possible outcomes: if she was acquitted, if her 26-year sentence was affirmed, and if she was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

If she could return home to Seattle right away, she put eight items on a wish list, from getting an apartment with her best friend — done — to repaying her parents and grandmother for the loans and mortgages they took out to pay her legal fees. (The $3.8 million advance she got for her book has gone a long way toward fulfilling that.) Now, a year and a half later, she has completed or at least taken some steps toward each item on the list. She has been in a relationship with her musician boyfriend, James Terrano, for more than a year.

If she had to complete her sentence, with the prospect of getting out of prison when she was in her 40s, she listed eight other goals, from graduating long-distance from the University of Washington — “even possible?” she wrote to the side — to getting a better job in prison.

She added three more items if she was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. She would stop writing letters home, she wrote, and she put question marks after two others. “Ask family and friends to forget me?” And: “Suicide?”

Other prisoners had attempted suicide while she was there, some successfully and others not. She knew the most reliable way to try, using a plastic bag. “I have a great amount of respect for life and I always think that no matter how bad situations get, you can always make something out of it,” she says in the interview. But it is possible to get to the point of being “so sad that you don’t even want to try.”

“That is the thing that I was scared of — that I would know intellectually that there’s something to glean out of life, but that I would be so broken that I wouldn’t care. I just wouldn’t want to fight anymore.”

The next day, the appeals court set her free, prompting cheers from some in the courtroom and boos from others. Experts appointed by the appeals court had concluded that the DNA samples found on the purported murder weapon and a bra clasp — the most important physical evidence against Knox and Sollecito — were too small to be conclusively matched to anyone. Some of the evidence had been mishandled and potentially tainted by investigators.

(Other DNA evidence helped convict Rudy Guede, now 26, of the murder; the Ivory Coast drifter and petty criminal is now serving a 16-year sentence. Prosecutors argue Knox and Sollecito acted in concert with him; the defense argues he acted alone.)

Knox was rushed back to the prison for her things. Guards returned the passport they had seized four years earlier. “I didn’t recognize my passport photo,” she writes in her book, seeing a picture of a “younger me” ready to set off for Italy. “I felt sad to see her. I wanted to say, ‘You have no idea what’s going to happen to you.’”

‘WHAT DO YOU DO?’

These days, one of Knox’s favorite hangouts is a tea house near her apartment in the funky International District in downtown Seattle, on the ground floor of the historic Panama Hotel, opened in 1910. On this afternoon, the proprietor, Jan Johnson, has brought out some snapshots that show the empty space before it had been converted into a brick-lined retreat for tea and espresso.

Knox is admiring the pictures when Johnson notices the reporter and photographer trailing her. “What do you do?” she asks with friendly curiosity. Knox, accustomed to encountering strangers who know altogether too much about her, seems surprised at the anonymity. “I’m a writer,” she finally replies, smiling.

At the same time, though, teenagers at a table are elbowing one another and pointing at Knox. A girl snaps a photo on her cellphone, then shows her friends, giggling.

Knox often wears glasses, in part because she became increasingly nearsighted in prison and in part because it makes her less recognizable. When she returned to classes at the University of Washington, to her discomfort some students would take her picture in class and post it on Twitter; that rarely happens anymore. In her creative-writing class, she sometimes writes on themes drawn from her days in prison, and it is no longer such a big deal to anyone, she says.

When she first arrived in Seattle, she suffered nightmares and panic attacks. Her family worried that she might have post-traumatic stress disorder. She reluctantly agreed to see a counselor, who urged her to talk about whatever she liked.

“I started talking about the here-and-now, about the things that I went through, just the things that I was struggling with — like I was disappointing the people I loved because I wasn’t the same person anymore,” she recalls. “And I worried and I feared that I was disappointing them by not coming back quite the same.”

Suddenly she found herself weeping uncontrollably and feeling trapped. She called her boyfriend, who picked her up. She never went back.

HOPING FOR CLOSURE

Knox insists she had no involvement in this grisly crime against a roommate she describes as a friend. She felt a natural kinship with her 21-year-old British roommate, she says, both adventurous young women with divorced parents. She disputes accounts that they didn’t like one another. She says she was shocked and shaken when Meredith’s body, her throat slit and her partially nude body covered with a duvet, was found in the cottage they shared with two young Italian women.

At the time of the murder, she says, she and Sollecito were at his apartment, watching a movie and smoking a joint. (“Marijuana was as common as pasta” for her and her friends in Italy, she writes.)

In her book, Knox walks through each step of her interrogation and piece of evidence for her view of what it means and, in some cases, how she says it was skewed by Italian law-enforcement officials. Police and prosecutors devised a bizarre theory of the murder and refused to be swayed, even in the face of contradictory evidence, she says. At times she blames herself for failing to understand what was happening — for not being as mature, as smart or as strong as the situation demanded.

She hopes her book “shows the growing-up-ness” of the experience, she says. She struggled to stay calm and sane while held in the Capanne prison, fighting for her freedom and leaning on the prison’s Catholic chaplain, Don Saulo Scarabattoli. She rebuffed sexual overtures from guards, she says, and avoided provocation from aggressive and unpredictable fellow prisoners.

She knows there are those who will never believe she is innocent, possibly including Kercher’s family. Of perhaps two dozen books published about her case, she has read only a few, including Meredith, written by father John Kercher and published last spring. In it, Kercher, a British journalist, describes Knox’s conviction as hard-won justice.

“It matters to me what Meredith’s family thinks,” Knox says. “It does affect me — me, and the peace that I have inside.” Tears well in her eyes again. “I would hope, like, I really hope that the Kerchers read my book, and they don’t have to believe me. I have no right to demand anything of anyone. But I hope they try.”

She has hesitated to contact them. “I’ve always been afraid of just upsetting them, and I feel like as long as there’s question of my involvement in Meredith’s death, I don’t want to impose myself on them.” She had thought that reaching out might be possible once Italy’s highest court had affirmed her acquittal.

Instead, their decision for a retrial has become one more barrier. She will have to convince another court of her innocence before the case could be closed. “It’s this, this, this field of barbed wire that I’m having to crawl through so I can finally get to the side where, OK, we’re finally on the same side” as the Kercher family.

“The ideal situation in my mind is that they could show me Meredith’s grave. Because it was like, I wasn’t allowed to grieve, either, and that would mean a lot to me.” An hour later, she raises the same prospect again when asked whether this episode of her life would ever truly be over.

“I really want to go see her grave,” she says. “And right now I don’t feel like I have the right to without her family’s permission. So that’s something that I want to work toward to get closure.”

She is wearing a small gold necklace of a dove. The chaplain gave it to her the night she was waiting for the appeals-court decision that, it turned out, reversed her conviction.

“He gave it to me to remind me I am free, no matter where I am,” she says, touching it like a talisman. “I don’t wear it always, but I wear it on important occasions, and when I need to remind myself of that.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

WASHINGTON — The 20 women in the Senate had plans to get together for dinner Tuesday, at Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s house. Then President Obama called and asked them to come over to his place instead.

“I hope he has a chance to get a word in edgewise,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said. “We’ll have a lot to say.”

Obama has hosted one dinner with a small group of Republican senators and another of Democratic ones in an effort to forge closer ties in Congress as he pushes his second-term agenda. Now he is joining one of the few enduring bipartisan conclaves on Capitol Hill, the regular dinner series held by the growing number of female members of the Senate. On the agenda: trying to reach a compromise budget deal and the prospects for passing a comprehensive immigration bill this year.

Klobuchar, interviewed for the USA TODAY video series “Capital Download,” rejected the suggestion by some Republican senators that the Boston Marathon bombing — thought to be the work of two Chechen immigrants — was a reason to reconsider an immigration overhaul. “I don’t think it’s a reason to slow it down,” she said. “I think it’s actually a reason to make reforms,” underscoring the need to more closely track “who gets in here and how they get in and who they are.”

Those urging a slowdown “were going to oppose the immigration bill anyway, is my guess.”

She said the odds of passing an immigration overhaul “are incredibly high” in the wake of a proposal unveiled last week by the so-called Gang of Eight, four Republican and four Democratic senators. But hopes for passing a gun-control bill have faded, especially after supporters last week couldn’t muster the 60 votes necessary for a bipartisan plan sponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., to expand background checks of gun buyers.

“One of the most disappointing things for me, really, since I’ve been in the Senate was when Sen. Manchin and Sen. Toomey put themselves on the line, were able to broach this compromise and bring people together — that that failed,” she said.

A USA TODAY Poll published Tuesday found support for passing a gun-control bill has ebbed a bit, to 49%-45%, four months after the shooting rampage at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., fueled calls for action.

“This has gone on through history, where an incident happens that’s very tragic and then people get focused on it and the next thing you know, you have Boston and people focused on that,” Klobuchar said. “This year may be hard, but the American people are mad about this.”

Klobuchar had kind words for former comedian Al Franken, the junior senator from Minnesota and a fellow Democrat who was elected in 2008 by a margin of 312 votes. He is running for re-election in 2014.

“He would like to more than double his margin, that’s his goal,” Klobuchar joked, then added, “He’s clearly done a good job in the Senate. He’s put his head down and worked. People thought, ‘Oh, his former life on Saturday Night LIve, is he going to just be a laugh riot and come over and be a celebrity?’ That just hasn’t been the case at all. He’s put Minnesota first and done his work.”

Klobuchar, a two-term senator who turns 53 on Thursday, dodged a question about whether she was interesting in running for president. “I love my job right now,” she said. “This is what I’m doing.” She noted that Minnesota’s tradition, including Walter Mondale and Hubert Humphrey, was to be elected for the No. 2 job.

“In fact, the joke is that in Minnesota, new moms bounce their babies on their knees and say, ‘One day, you can grow up to be vice president.’”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

WASHINGTON — Four months after the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a USA TODAY Poll finds support for a new gun-control law ebbing as prospects for passage on Capitol Hill seem to fade.

Americans are more narrowly divided on the issue than in recent months, and backing for a bill has slipped below 50%, the poll finds. By 49%-45%, those surveyed favor Congress passing a new gun-control law. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in early April, 55% had backed a stricter gun law, which was down from 61% in February.

The survey of 1,002 adults was taken Thursday through Sunday by Princeton Survey Research. The margin of error is +/- 4 percentage points.

Those who support a bill want advocates in Congress to hang tough and not compromise — an attitude that also could complicate passing legislation. Sixty-one percent say members of Congress “should only agree to a stronger version of the bill, even if it might not pass.” Just 30% say they should “accept a weaker law” they know can win approval.

“So much of the support for gun control is emotional, following the Newtown tragedy,” says Stuart Rothenberg, editor and publisher of the non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report. The December shooting at the Connecticut school left 20 children and six adults dead. “The longer you get away from there, people start thinking of other issues. They start thinking about terrorism or jobs or immigration, and not surprisingly, then some of the momentum behind gun control starts to fade.”

The Boston Marathon bombings last Monday also may have had an effect, he speculates. “It wouldn’t be shocking if people sitting in their homes in Massachusetts cities and towns thought to themselves, ‘Boy, I wish I had something to protect myself with if a terrorist came through the door now.’”

Last week in the Senate, a bipartisan proposal for expanding background checks for gun buyers failed to win the 60 votes needed.

Those surveyed who oppose a gun-control bill are split on whether senators who agree should use a filibuster to block debate: 44% back the idea of a filibuster; 41% oppose it.

On immigration, support for taking action is strong: 80% back “better border control” and 71% favor creating a pathway to citizenship for immigrants now in the United States illegally, if they meet certain requirements. Just 25% oppose creating a process to gain citizenship.

Americans remain more concerned about tough enforcement, however. By 55%-33%, they say they place a higher priority on preventing illegal immigration in the future than on dealing with immigrants who already are in the U.S. illegally.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

WASHINGTON — Is there a second-term curse?

Historian Robert Dallek thinks there just might be — and President Obama’s current travails could be the latest example.

“After one party loses two elections in a row, there’s sort of blood in the water,” Dallek said in an interview Wednesday on USA TODAY’s weekly newsmaker video series, Capital Download. “They’re really eager to strike back and reduce the influence, the control of second-term presidents.” What’s more, a president’s shortcomings have had time to surface after four years in office.

Obama already was facing congressional hearings into the killing of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, in Libya last year. In recent days, new controversies have erupted over the admission by the Internal Revenue Service that it targeted Tea Party-affiliated groups for special scrutiny and the disclosure that the Justice Department had seized the phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors in a leak investigation.

“This may be the moment that Republicans have found to bring together the various issues that are troubling this administration,” Dallek said. “And it could be so much of a downer that his agenda, which is already in trouble, is going to be ruined or undermined so that it blights his presidency.”

Being forced to take time and resources to defend himself in these battles is likely to make it more difficult for Obama to win congressional approval of a sweeping immigration bill, perhaps his top second-term goal. “You lose a certain amount of standing,” Dallek said. “You only have so much presidential credibility and control.”

The most serious controversy may turn out to be the AP subpoenas, which have prompted protests and criticism from a wide range of news organizations. “It’s a very bad idea to have the press opposing you,” Dallek said. “As Richard Nixon found out, as Lyndon Johnson found out, they can hurt you, because if they are beating the drum on the negative side of your presidency, it undermines the president’s ability to lead.”

Dallek has written presidential biographies of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and others. His latest book, Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House, is scheduled to be published in October.

He is one of several historians who have been invited to a series of private dinners at the White House with Obama, most recently in January. “He seemed much more upbeat and hopeful,” Dallek said. “He had the election behind him. Now he had a second chance to move forward on his agenda and establish himself as a great, effective president. But there are always those things that are simmering below the surface that can pop up to undermine him.”

Follow @SusanPage on Twitter.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.