Could the tea party fever...

...in Washington be breaking? Maybe? Just a little?

In Joe Nocera's column in the Times today, he writes (my emphasis):

Thursday night, after I got home, I had a phone conversation with Scott Rigell, a Virginia Republican who first won election in 2010 by campaigning as a modern-day fiscal conservative. That is to say, he believed, as he told me, “that we have a spending problem not a revenue problem.”

But after he got to Congress, he dug deeper, and came to what he calls “a data-driven, analytic conclusion.” Namely: spending cuts alone could not eliminate the deficit. The country needed more tax revenue as well. He showed his data to everyone he could on his side of the aisle. They nodded politely and continued to insist on not raising taxes. Rigell did not revert back, however. “We have to have the courage to critique and refine our own platform,” he said. “That isn’t weakness. It is intellectual honesty.”