Where's a better place? I watch CSpan on occassion, and the Hill is a much worse place. Political discussions tend to devolve, but so do discussions about Microsoft, Google, Apple, RoR, Python, typing, editors, IDEs, paradigms, SLC, etc...
With that said, everyone has to decide where to spend their time. And everyone has a preference as to what kind of discussions they prefer to have. I hope Matt finds a great community whereever he ends up going.
I don't think you'd keep someone with Matt Maroon's portfolio of complaints just by eliminating politics; after all, people do also write pointless comments about Apple. But that doesn't mean the politics stories aren't a correctible deficiency in the site.
To be clear, I was simply responding to something you said. You gave the impression that it was the quality of political discussion, not simply that it was against the rules.
A simple way to avoid problems would be to require all submissions to have code in the body of the text. The broad notion of "hacker" is too broad to be useful, IMO.