Political science isn't, at all, mindless, and there are focus areas within it that are extremely rigorous either elitist or analytically or both.

OTOH, there's not a lot of places where a PoliSci Ph.D. would substitute for industry experience (or, for that matter, vice versa.) If you want to substitute an academic degree in that general space for “industry” experience, you go for public policy and/or public administration (or, arguably, law), not political science.