If this is Joe Biden when he’s forceful and passionate, the country is better off with the passive and detached version.

The president gave a thunderous address in Philadelphia on July 13 denouncing alleged Republican voter suppression. Biden blatantly distorted Republican state-level election laws.

This tack already got a successful test run by Stacey Abrams when she lost in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial campaign. She refused to concede and today almost all Democrats treat her, without cause, as the rightful victor.

According to Biden, the GOP election rules are one of the most grievous affronts to our democratic rights ever. He called this push “the most serious test of our democracy since the Civil War.” Half the country left the union during the Civil War, and more than 600,000 people died in a yearslong war, which obviously doesn’t bear comparison to, say, passing voter ID laws.

First of all, the Georgia law increases the hours available for early voting, and it preserves ballot drop boxes, an emergency measure adopted during the pandemic.

Other key provisions have sensible rationales.

Where long lines are an endemic problem, the new law mandates that counties either reduce the size of precincts or add new equipment or workers.

The law seeks to reduce the number of provisional ballots by diminishing a leading reason people vote provisionally, i.e., they show up at the wrong precinct. Election workers will direct such voters to the correct precinct.

In the same spirit, the law says voters can’t request absentee ballots later than 11 days prior to the election — because many absentee ballots are rejected for arriving late. Even if you oppose every single one of these measures, Georgia will still have online registration, extensive early voting and no-excuse absentee voting.

As Henry Olsen of The Washington Post points out, most advanced countries around the world don’t have all the different ways to vote that Georgia does.

Biden either doesn’t realize this, or doesn’t care.

The presumption that marginal changes in election laws measurably affect turnout, a key assumption of the Democratic case against GOP election bills, is simply erroneous. Voter ID laws haven’t suppressed turnout.

Abrams has proved that the charge of voter suppression is a powerful partisan motivator. Biden made a nod in this direction when he said, “We’ll engage in an all-out effort to educate voters about the changing laws, register them to vote, and then get the vote out.”

Never mind that this wouldn’t be possible under a new Jim Crow.

When it comes to juicing up his own supporters, the Biden speech may have been effective, but it wasn’t statesmanship — or remotely truthful.