Par for the course on the Democratic talking points here: Koch brothers!; ObamaCare is awesome because you can’t be charged for preexisting conditions or because you’re a woman; we need to fix ObamaCare, not completely get rid of it. Sen. Udall has been trying to gently distance himself from President Obama, and while he isn’t in quite the tragically vulnerable position as some of his Democratic Senate colleagues in redder states, a PPP earlier this month put him at only 2 points ahead of challenger Rep. Cory Gardner — and it sounds like Udall’s taking the advice of that Democratic pollster Allahpundit mentioned yesterday pretty darn seriously.

UDALL: You know, you bring up the ads. There’s going to be a lot of out state money coming in. You can’t buy elections in Colorado. You have to earn them. Coloradans are smart enough to know who is telling the truth and who works on their behalf. And I got to tell you, the Koch brothers who fund these ads really don’t have the interest of Coloradans in mind. To your question, we had a broken system, we had a system that allowed insurance companies to drop people with no notice and refuse coverage, so in the end we had to act. We had to fix a broken system. We now have a system that is far from perfect, but my focus is making it work for Coloradans. And that’s the Colorado spirit. We can’t go back to a time when if you were a woman the insurance companies could drop your coverage. Too many families went into bankruptcy because of health care costs. So in the end we did the right thing. The law is far from perfect. My focus is making it work for Colorado.

HOST: So you’d do it again?

UDALL: I would do it again, Yes, I would… I think, look, if I were there I would say here are some things that we should have done differently, here are some things that make more sense.

Another item to watch in this race is the effect of the burgeoning national debate on natural-gas exports, courtesy of the Russian invasion of Crimea: Natural gas is pretty big in Colorado, and Udall will be swinging hard for the pro-energy, pro-jobs fences, as frequently and as vocally as possible — but the Republican House doesn’t have the tortured internal environmentalist divisions that the Democrat-controlled Senate does, and Gardner’s bill on this would be more likely to make it to the floor first:

Colorado Democratic Sen. Mark Udall has branded himself “champion of Colorado’s natural gas industry” in the latest front to open up in his campaign against Republican Rep. Cory Gardner.

Udall and Gardner both introduced similar legislation this week to fast-track the approval process for a liquefied natural gas exports from a proposed terminal in Maryland. The measures are meant to speed up the process of exporting natural gas to Ukraine to undercut the threat posed to the region by Russian President Vladimir Putin. …

Both lawmakers argued for their proposals Tuesday. If approval of the licensing process for LNG exports is fast-tracked, it’s expected to not only undercut Russia’s hold over Ukraine but also boost energy-sector employment and natural gas production.

Udall used his advantage in timing to suggest in a press release that his amendment was another example of “his many years of support for Colorado’s energy industry,” even though the environmental group League of Conservation Voters gives him a 97 percent score for fighting pollution and protecting the environment.