Donohue, whose bulldog mien would be at home in a William Kennedy novel, charges that Saunders and other AFSCME leaders have concentrated too heavily on national politics, leaving state capitals vulnerable to takeover by people like Scott Walker, the conservative governor of Wisconsin who, shortly after being elected in 2010, stripped unions of collective bargaining rights. “Lee Saunders was Jerry McEntee’s guy for years and isn’t bringing anything new,” Donohue told me. “When the crisis hits, they show up with a check and say, ‘We’re here!’ But the international should be there before a crisis. You can’t deal with [Republican politicians] once they reach certain levels. We want to be involved in town boards, school boards, mayor’s races, so these politicians know who you are as they are moving up.” As one example of what Donohue regards as AFSCME’s excessive focus on national politics, he cites its $950,000 ad buy attacking Mitt Romney in Florida before that state’s January primary. It would have been better, he says, to invest that money in the union’s grassroots network in Florida, notably the many underused AFSCME retirees living there.

Saunders, a bearish 60-year-old who can occasionally be roused to McEntee-style profanity, rejected these characterizations when I visited him at AFSCME headquarters. The union, he said, has long sought to balance spending in state, local, and national politics and will do so again as it allocates the $100 million it plans to spend this election cycle. “We’ve got to be players here in Washington. We’ve got to be able to portray our positions in a very strong kind of fashion. We’ve got to have those relationships here,” he said. “We can’t afford not to play in national politics, because it has direct impacts on the state and local level.”

The Florida ad buy, Saunders argued, was justified because “Romney is going to be the Republican candidate ... and you’ve got to soften him up in a variety of ways.” He acknowledged that the union may have grown slightly complacent in recent years—“I’m not saying we were sleeping, but maybe sometimes we were dozing off a little bit.” His concession went only so far, however. AFSCME, he said, had invested heavily in state-level races in 2010, but the GOP wave was just too big. And no one, he insisted, could have anticipated just how fierce the resulting anti-union assault would be. “I don’t think anyone in [Wisconsin] nor anyone around the country could have predicted that [Walker] was going to come after collective bargaining rights,” rather than simply union pay and benefit levels, he said. Moreover, he pointed out, AFSCME had been instrumental in the effort to recall Walker, which will go to a statewide vote in June.

AFSCME officials on the front lines confirmed part of what Saunders was saying. Chris Mabe, head of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, which helped overturn sweeping anti-union legislation in a statewide referendum last fall, told me that AFSCME “has always been on the ground and involved in every local issue. I don’t recall a time we lacked for money, marble, or chalk.” Rich Abelson, director of one of AFSCME’s three Wisconsin units, agreed, but also contradicted Saunders’s suggestion that the scale of the anti-union attack was unforeseeable, saying that Walker had made his intentions clear during his years running Milwaukee County. “We weren’t in any way, shape, or size taken by surprise by what happened,” Abelson said.