Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader evaded the question Wednesday of whether he sees himself as a potential spoiler in presumptive Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama’s (Ill.) bid for the presidency.

But the Green Party member also had sharp words for Obama, saying that for he and others who were involved in the civil rights movement, and who discussed the possibilities of having a black man elected president, “it doesn’t look like it’s going to be what we all thought it was going to be.”

Nader lamented the treatment of third-party candidates as second-class citizens, and also took aim at Obama’s “decreasing level of fortitude.”

He said he lost a lot of respect for Obama when he saw him on C-SPAN expressing his opposition to the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney — a top agenda item for progressives — because it would be divisive.

“That is a cop-out word,” he said.

Nader, speaking to journalists at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, criticized both Obama and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the presumptive GOP nominee, for “blurring” important issues as they move toward Election Day. He did not go so far as to say that Obama and McCain are interchangeable, as he suggested about Bush and then-Vice President Al Gore in 2000, but he did say that whoever is elected would be beholden to a system that will not allow them to really pursue their own agendas.

“They’re all homogenized by the corporatization of our government,” he said.