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.