Not masterful at all. It wasn't just PR spin. Garzik actually believes what he says. Although he was well-spoken, this is fundamentally the wrong position to be taking with the media.  Here's why.

Cash is slowly going away and social utopians everywhere are talking about the nirvana of a global cashless society. Well, that all sounds great until people wake up one day and realize that what they have sacrificed in the transition to a cashless utopia is any thread of financial privacy that remained with paper cash. The phrase 'resist digital money unless anonymous' really means don't give up paper cash if the future is even more traceable and intrusive.

Therefore, stressing bitcoin's traceability and that bitcoin is not anonymous becomes the worst of both worlds -- cashless and traceable! No one is fooling the authorities by saying bitcoin is fully traceable and some people know safe bitcoin practices. Press interviews like this one retard the 'separation of money and State' cause and reinforce the harmful notion that money can and should be used for identity tracking. Those are bitcoin's positive key differentiators.

I ran out of time before I could even write what a bad idea MSB regulation is for bitcoin....but last week I posted my other PR thoughts (Jews as money launderers, etc., etc.) here: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8940.msg164099#msg164099