I think if you look at submissions from a numbers standpoint, the main difference between political news submissions and "hacker news" submissions is the number. As annoying as it may be, there are more outlets (publishers/bloggers/articles etc) for political news than there are for hacker news. Therefore, when someone writes about his or her weekend project, there is one article; when a major security flaw is found in some piece of hardware or software, there are three articles/blog posts; and when something like news about SOPA/NSA/Snowden breaks, there are five to ten (or even more) articles/blog posts/news media pages.
If we generously assume that 100% of arrive on HN as submissions, then it makes sense that the distribution of submissions will weigh towards the more popular in terms of number of submissions for different articles for the same topic (visualize a histogram).
My solution would be to have a way to merge separate submissions that fall under the same topic (basically, one or more URLs per topic). How it would be implemented (tags, users marking submissions as "similar" or "flagged for merge") would be up for debate.
Edit:
Maybe a single optional "political" tag with a profile setting and/or a separate subsection for submissions marked as "political".
If we generously assume that 100% of arrive on HN as submissions, then it makes sense that the distribution of submissions will weigh towards the more popular in terms of number of submissions for different articles for the same topic (visualize a histogram).
My solution would be to have a way to merge separate submissions that fall under the same topic (basically, one or more URLs per topic). How it would be implemented (tags, users marking submissions as "similar" or "flagged for merge") would be up for debate.
Edit:
Maybe a single optional "political" tag with a profile setting and/or a separate subsection for submissions marked as "political".