I understand that to someone who saw what happened to reddit, the sight of words like "Obama" or "Union" in a title is very alarming. But not all stories with those words in their titles are boring political ones.
Don't worry, I won't let News.YC go down that road. I'll munge the voting algorithm before I let that happen.
I like hearing what the people on this site have to say about those types of issues and if they hold any relation to your businesses and strategies, even if they are 'off-topic'.
I actually think that 'boring' isn't the problem though. Boring stuff is easy to ignore. Political stories, on the other hand, are easy for everyone to have an opinion on, and get excited about. This tends to draw people in who otherwise might refrain from commenting... basically what happened to the reddit community. There were initially some political articles with the rest, and they were pretty good, and a decent mix of liberals and libertarians. Then it hit a tipping point, and that stuff completely drowned out the rest of the site.
I trust that you'll ensure that doesn't happen, but part of the equation isn't necessarily better algorithms, IMO, but trying to foster a community spirit of "let's avoid these things for the sake of the site's quality".