Juliet asked, “What’s in a name?” But what if she had asked, “What’s in a face?”

The answer is, of course, “more information than we can imagine.” After all, every face conveys so much information that the human brain not only identifies Aunt Sophia among a throng of ten thousand people (or even a billion) but also perceives important facial subtleties of which we are not even consciously aware.

What kind of subtleties? Consider the findings presented in “Facial appearance affects voting decisions,” Little, et al., Evolution and Human Behavior, 2007:

“We show that differences in facial shape alone between candidates can predict who wins or loses in an election (Study 1) and that changing context from war time to peace time can affect which face receives the most votes (Study 2).”

One must read the study’s methods to learn how the researchers discovered and then received feedback about the facial features voters perceive and process; but my topic here is not the study but the fact it came to mind when I heard Barack Obama had chosen Joe Biden as his running mate.

Why? Well, ever since he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, I’ve believed Biden has a certain facial feature that can be powerfully negative to voters. Curiously enough, it is his smile.

Coincidentally, David Brooks, who sang the Senator’s praises in his NY Times column (“Hoping It’s Biden”), mentions Biden’s smile after pointing out that in overcoming the stuttering the Senator suffered as a youth, he has “ developed an odd smile as a way to relax his facial muscles.”

To me, however, the smile is more than odd because with its forward baring of teeth, it conveys an arrogant insincerity, evident even when Biden asks a person whether or not he has pronounced his name correctly.

My reaction to Biden’s smile, which surely is shared by others, received support over the weekend as political analysts repeatedly mentioned how Obama’s VP choice loves hearing himself talk (he asked John Roberts the longest, most bumbling question ever asked in the history of the blustering Senate) and loves his intellect (He responded to a C-Span viewer who inquired about his law school record with, “I think I have a much higher IQ than you do.”).

However, amid all the talk about the Senator from Delaware — from the “idiotic things” he has said (Brooks) to his “working class roots, honesty, loyalty, [and] experience” (Brooks, again) — a crucial fact about Joe Biden’s record has gone unmentioned, a fact infinitely more important than any facial feature or habit of speech, a fact that in a better America would disqualify any candidate from sitting in the Oval Office or one heartbeat away from it.

That fact is this: Joe Biden is a fierce, true-believing supporter of liberal judicial activism. For evidence, consider the following:

He is the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman who said, “I don’t have an open mind [about Judge Robert Bork]. The reason I don’t is that I know this man.”

He is the Senator who voted “nay” on the nominations of Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito and “yea” on those of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

He is the Senator who regrets his vote to confirm Antonin Scalia and who reacted to the possibility of Scalia’s nomination for chief justice by saying, “I would oppose him because of his methodology, the way he interprets the Constitution.”

Senator Biden is, therefore, a person whose arrogance has caused him to fall in love with what is, in plain words, the idea of a judicial oligarchy, a perverse form of government that rejects democracy in favor of the mumbo jumboed by as few as five black robed dictators who one day base a decision upon the medieval hocus pocus that words emit “emanations” that form “penumbras,” the next upon egotistically determined “evolving standards of decency,” and the day after that upon the illogical arrogance of being “informed” by laws of other nations.

Yes, despite any negative messages revealed by his face, Biden’s embrace of liberal judicial activism disqualifies him from holding the office of vice-president (just as it disqualifies Barack Obama from assuming the presidency); for talk of his “working class roots notwithstanding, he, like all judicial activists and their supporters and unlike Jeffersonians, considers the people of the fifty states ignorant slobs who cannot be trusted to determine the meaning of “decency” in a “maturing society.”

However, if there is something in Senator Biden’s face that helps the public come to the same conclusion, that will be a good thing as it convinces Americans to side with Thomas Jefferson, who so passionately opposed judicial activism he argued that the “safety of society” requires we remove activist judges from the bench just as we “commit honest maniacs” to an insane asylum.

. . . With George Washington, who warned against the usurpation of power within our three branches of government “for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.”

. . . And with Norman Mailer, who, if he never uttered another political opinion that makes sense, was both brilliant and prescient when he said that “the gross and subtle folds of corruption on the average senatorial face are hardly the lineaments of virtue.”

Copyright by A.J. DiCintio