I’ll start by saying what many others have already said: It’s appalling to criticize a candidate’s kids for political gain.

Seeing Gus Walz’s public display of joy, excitement, pride, and love for his dad brought me to tears, as did several other moments of the 2024 Democratic National Convention. It’s been awhile since I’ve felt this hopeful and engaged. It’s because what I heard from the podium night after night are qualities I aspire to: kindness, compassion, dignity, respect, care, hope, joy.

And that’s what I saw in the footage of Walz’s family, too.

Early in my career I worked with colleagues who were creating something called the “Theme Machine” that detected themes in a transcript or text based on how frequently words occurred and co-occurred (this will seem quaint compared to what AI does today, but bear with me). So as I listened to the various speeches at the convention, I wondered what I’d find if I looked just at simple word frequency for the speeches by the Democractic and Republican president and VP speeches. (Method geek moment: I used one of the many word cloud apps that removes commonly occurring words such as “the” and I took out the names of the candidates and the word “president”).

Of the words that remained, some were shared in common in the speeches by the two parties’ candidates: “will,” “going,” “people,” and “America” (which actually occurred more frequently for Harris/Walz than for the other guys). I was (not) surprised that “freedom” and “security” were the fifth and eighth most frequent words for Harris/Walz but didn’t make the top 20 for the other guys. Seventh and ninth for the other guys? “we’re” versus “they’re.” “Love” and “united” also make the top 20 for Harris/Walz.

I did also hear about policies that matter to me and about what they plan to do if elected (and, importantly, these were consistent with the values that were on display). But what moved me about the convention was the joy, excitement, and pride that was so evident throughout. Gus Walz’s public display of emotion captured this. Kindness, dignity, respect, joy, hope are not “weak” or “soft.” They are the values to which we all should aspire, not only in private life but in public life, too.