The "birth of a political jihad" was definitely earlier, as you state.
I have 2GigaBytes of political and aviation info dating from late in Bush'41 and the first days of the 'Toon presidency... using GOPHER, mostly, to access the web.
That was so much easier than EMail lists and FTP that came even earlier than that...
The birth came well before '96/'97 ... by '96 I recall laughing at the statement by the Old Mediots "we don't know whether we're going to cover the political conventions any more - they've just become paid political announcements"... my retort to my friends was, "in a few years, I'll be WATCHING them on the Internet", and this past year that is exactly what I did!