Vince Flaherty was raised in Southern California. His father was a syndicated columnist and a speech writer for Senator John F. Kennedy. He has maintained successful businesses in the motion picture and real estate industry and is a hands-on expert in labor relations relating to entertainment, real estate and construction. He formerly served with the Palm Springs Police Department. He is a past council member of the Pacific Palisades Community Council. He served as representative of The Castellammare Mesa Homeowners Association, and is credited with saving a 16-acre wooded area, known as The Ocean Woods, from a tract of 23 homes. He is a past president and lifetime director of the Pacific Palisades Historical Society. In that capacity he assisted with efforts that led the State of California to abandon plans for a large parking lot in Los Liones Canyon, and he helped implement a program of planting indigenous trees, and restoration of the canyon's riparian stream bed. He is known for his community activism and his newspaper articles, as an advocate for restoration and preservation of the California coastline.

No stranger to politics and California issues, he worked as an aide to Congressman Charles Wilson (R) and former Governor Pat Brown (D). He was the driver for California State Treasurer Kathleen Brown during her campaign for governor. In recent years, he has contributed his efforts to the elections of Republican, Democratic and Independent candidates.

He consistently donates his efforts toward helping young people, and whenever he has the chance to speak to school students, he jumps on it. He is a long time supporter of the Santa Monica Boys and Girls Club and an Assistant Scoutmaster of Boy Scout Troop 223 in Pacific Palisades. He lectures in the Los Angeles Unified School District in his capacity as an authority on California History. He is also regarded for his efforts with youth athletics, and was awarded a resolution of the highest commendation from the Board of Supervisors of the County of Los Angeles for his outstanding service in representing the people, by guiding the Westside Bruins Youth Football Team to victory at the National Championship Finals. But the vocation he enjoys most is his one as a husband, and father of two sons

Financial, corporate, military and other interests have been hijacking governments of the world, off and on for hundreds of years, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Now we are at a particularly perilous point. But the current majority of our legislators have either ignored their conflicts of interest, or been more directly culpable. Vince seeks to change our American government that has shown itself to be a government for the corporation, into a government that workd for the interests of the people. He is looking forward to seeing the Citizens United decision overruled. He is an environmentalist committed to phasing out dependence upon foreign oil and nuclear energy. But at the same time he is aware Montana and North Dakota contain eight times more oil than Saudi Arabia, and that foreign oil interests are indirectly funding misguided groups to prevent drilling for American oil.

Vince believes that Publicly Funded Elections are now necessary to keep the spark of Democracy alive. He is not afraid to break up the big banks into more manageable pieces, instill trust in the free market by reasonable and responsible regulation, reduce the deficit, and restore the California economy by providing relief to taxpayers without cutting education or damaging transportation and trade. There doesn't appear to be anyone else in office who is at liberty to do that today. Yet he is chagrined by knowing what to do, while many people continue to place their trust in the same old tunnel-vision political-machine politicians. That's why Vince is so committed. That's why he is obligated.