I think that there is a distinction to be made here between /politically/ expedient solutions, and expedient solutions with regards to actual goals.

The war on drugs, high incarceration rates, and trumpeting an ideology of low taxes are all politically expedient, but not necessarily expedient with regard to what we actually want to achieve.

In an optimization problem, a nearest neighbor algorithms will generally produce a sub-optimal, but okay result.

This is only true, however, if your nearest neighbor algorithm is using the correct selection heuristic... Garbage in, garbage out.

Our political system needs a new heuristic.

(Assuming P!=NP, and that the governance of California is an NP hard optimization problem...)