It does, and it has. You are correct about that.
But it is unfortunate that it does, because people are deeper than their physical characteristics.
I think a distinction between physical characteristics and body language is important. I do think body language affects opinions of people. I have known a number of people who are not attractive by much of any standard but their body language is so positive that people are drawn to them. It isn’t hard to tell a sincere smile from a fake one. This article is about body language not beauty whether one accepts his opinion of Cruz or not.
I was taught this lesson in high school when our school voted for a "colors court" and a "king and queen" every year, which was supposed to honor kids who gave service to the school community, since the sports kids already had trophies and letter sweaters. The kids elected to the colors court typically were members of the Student Council, a lot of the really smart kids or outstanding service-committee kids. Of course a few of the sports stars and cheerleaders got elected to it anyway.
Guess who always got elected king and queen? That's right: the quarterback and the head cheerleader, regardless of what they had NOT done as service to the community.
This phenomenon is one of the reasons the Founders did not want a popular democracy, and put their faith in a representative democracy. That was back when we had a monoculture with universally Christian values; and people used to read essays and the transcripts of speeches in black & wite newspapers to get political information. Now, it's all smoke and mirrors.