A Martha Coakley loss in today’s Massachusetts election will likely be interpreted as a repudiation of the current Democratic agenda and that of President Obama, in particular, and pundits will inevitably call for more bipartisanship on healthcare and other issues. It is interesting to note, then, that the Coakley campaign had strong Republican ties at its highest levels.

Coakley campaign co-chair Ralph C Martin II was a prominent Massachusetts Republican until recently. He served as the Republican District Attorney of Suffolk County throughout the nineties, and also chaired former Governor Mitt Romney’s Judicial Nominating Commission. He has been floated as a Republican candidate for Senator and Mayor in recent years, though he switched his voter registration from Republican to unenrolled in 2006. It’s unclear if he has since joined the Democratic Party.

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The same year that Hartford Insurance settled a $20 million fraud suit with the state of New York, board member and compensation chair Paul Kirk decided to make the company’s CEO the second-highest paid executive in the insurance industry.

Today, Kirk was named Kennedy’s successor in the Senate by Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick.

Sunlight’s Paul Blumenthal detailed Paul Kirk’s corporate ties in a post this morning, highlighting his role on Hartford Financial Services’ compensation committee and his past lobbying work for Aventis pharmaceuticals. He also noted that Kirk helped make CEO Ramani Ayer one of the most overpaid executives in the country, according to Forbes, with compensation of $9 million in 2008. The New York Times chose to report exactly none of this in an article posted this afternoon.

The Hartford is an insurance company, so it wasn’t very hard to find areas where they’ve run afoul of the law. Seriously: google “Hartford Financial” fraud. There you have it: in 2006, the company agreed to pay $20 million to settle an investigation by New York and Connecticut into fraudulent sales of retirement products:

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A possible candidate for Senator Kennedy’s seat has spent the last ten years building the biggest pharmaceutical lobbying practice in the country.

Nick Littlefield is chair of the lobbying group at Boston law firm Foley Hoag, which has raced to the top of the pharma lobbying charts over the last several years. In the first half of 2009, the firm raked in $2.6 million from pharma — more lobbying cash from pharmaceutical interests over the course of six months than any law firm in history, according to a review of lobbying data from Open Secrets.

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