The US president Barack Obama has made only the fourth visit of his presidency to Afghanistan as the White House mulls a decision on how many troops to keep in the country beyond the end of the year. America wants to leave a small residual force, but that depends on Afghan president Hamid Karzai's successor agreeing to a security pact that he's refused to sign.

Republican political commentator Ford O'Connell.

FORD O'CONNELL: I tip my hat to the president; this is what you've got to on Memorial Day. But let's be honest, there is a little cynical politics at play here and this is about optics.

You know, his approval rating on foreign policy is 39 per cent; he's getting pounded in the media right now about the VA (Veteran's Affairs) scandal.

He is looking for anything to really change the narrative right now and I think that he's going to try and piggy back this trip into the West Point speech and try to really change basically the subject.

Read more at Radio Australia 

The recent scandals that have plagued the Obama administration have shown President Barack Obama to be either "the most incompetent or the most detached president in the modern era," says GOP strategist Ford O'Connell.

"And unfortunately, this should be worrying a lot of Americans," O'Connell told J.D. Hayworth on "America's Forum" on Newsmax TV. 

Obama has said about a variety of scandals taking place in his administration that he learned about them on television, including the most recent one in which secret wait lists were allegedly kept at several VA hospitals throughout the country to make it look like patients were not waiting more than the required 14-day period, while in some cases they were actually waiting for months. At the VA hospital in Phoenix, 40 patients allegedly died while waiting to see a doctor. 

O'Connell says that the problem stems from how Americans tend to vote because elections have become "a popularity contest, not a competency contest."

But the GOP strategist thinks Americans may be starting to see through the president. 

"It's sad and callous to say about this but in some ways, the VA scandal is a good thing," O'Connell said. "It's sad to see this coming off the back of veterans, but that's what it really takes for a lot of people to open their eyes to what has really been a farce as a presidency."

O'Connell said the VA scandal, like most issues relating to the military, is "a bipartisan issue, and it's really opening up the eyes of the mainstream media and independent fence-sitting voters to the fact that this is systematic failure on the part of the president. It may be time for new management."

Read more from Courtney Coren at Newsmax.com